A sunny afternoon in a computer-strewn office in Norwich and I am struggling to bond with a middle-aged bald man wearing a white polo neck and a smug grin who appears on the computer screen in front of me.

"You're being mean to me," he says, brow puckered, eyes flashing and deep voice resonating with mid-Atlantic twang.

"Oh dear," I answer. "I don't mean to, but I'm not really following you."

"Now you're being really mean," he reiterates, slamming a strange, pink and very girlish hand down on the table in front of him.

Daily Mail article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=404000&in_page_id=1770

George is an online robot that has sufficient artificial intelligence to chat with real people, in a variety of languages.

Rory Cellan-Jones visited UK firm InterMediaLab to meet their prize-winning virtual employee.

The RealPlayer Stream: George on the news

The next generation of children could be able to talk with their teddy bears, according to experts who say that 'chatbox' technology is progressing so fast that toys will be able to hold realistic human conversations within twenty years.

Full Metro story: http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/article.html?in_article_id=19290&in_page_id=2

The Festival of Science will be attended by its first virtual delegate, a software "chatbot" that can hold 1,000 conversations at the same time.

George is a thin, bald androgynous 40-year-old who can blink, fidget and converse with a peculiar, languid accent. The virtual human was developed by Rollo Carpenter, artificial intelligence (AI) programmer and managing director of Icogno Ltd, and Tim Child, founder of Televirtual Ltd.

The Telegraph article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/09/04/nscience04.xml

A ROBOT chat machine so life-like many people are fooled into thinking it's human has become the latest internet sensation.

The world's most sophisticated "chatbot" - invented by British scientists - can talk on the internet with hundreds of different people at the same time, but each person has the impression that it is only talking to them.

The Scotsman article: http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=1303512006