In April 2005, the BBC showed a documentary about an elderly Japanese woman called Akino who had been given a computer companion called Primo Puel.

She kissed it while it talked to her, and she said how safe she felt with it there, even when it was chattering away to itself in the next room.

She admitted that it was a preferable way of combating loneliness than praying in front of her dead husband’s shrine.

Puel is a primitive non-robotic companion. Even without the capability to move itself, Puel can record how Akino moves about the house and alert the health authorities if her routine changes.

Puel is not an isolated case and there is a solid body of international research on Artificial Companions, many times more ambitious than Puel.

They are designed to be conversationalists, chatty soft toys that tell jokes if they think you are miserable, read you the news if you ask and go through your family pictures with you on a screen if you are elderly and want to reminisce about your earlier life.

Some of this research is being done at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Oxford University Computer Laboratory as part of a large European-funded project called Companions, a four-year project with 100 collaborators at 15 sites in the EU and US.

The hardest thing for designers is to get a computer voice and conversation that can inspire the kind of trust and agreeable emotion that a human’s can. Although computer voices are now warm and regional, not tinny like Stephen Hawking’s, this task is by no means solved but we can already ask what will it be like to admit artificial companions into our society.

Will they want a social life in contact with each other? Will they be like Victorian servants gossiping about their employers below stairs, or will they collaborate to give us little presents they order over the Internet?

How will they change our relationships with each other? How important will they be in the emotional and practical lives of their owners? Who will need them and how much good or harm could they do?

Will they change our lives and social habits in the radical way technologies have in the past: as trains, telephones and television certainly have? Will they force changes in the law so that things that are not human could be liable for damages?

How many people with no knowledge of technology, will want a companion that may look like a furry handbag beside you on the sofa, but one which will keep track of their lives by conversation?

For the young, companions could simply be talking rucksacks, that could relay a child’s location to its parents, would tell them to stop at a road and look for traffic, and perhaps teach French while walking home from school.

Companions could get to know their owners focusing not only on providing them with assistance but perhaps also using the human-companion relationship so as to construct a life narrative of the owner.

This narrative could be developed from looking at and discussing the owner’s photos on the Internet. It is a form of autobiography building for everyone, for humans will soon have all their memory objects on the Internet, for example, photos, writings, videos and medical records.

Serious questions will then arise about the possible responsibilities of such companions. Are they responsible to the owner ,or to the state, and who owns those narratives after the owner’s death?

One thing we can be quite sure of is that artificial companions are coming. In a trivial way they have already arrived and millions of people have already met them.

The Japanese toys Tamagochi (literally ‘little eggs’) were a brief craze that saw sensible people worrying that they had not played with their Tamagochi for a few hours and that it might have begun to pine.

Pining meant sad eyes and icons on a tiny screen, and playing with it meant pushing a feed button several times. The extraordinary thing about the Tamagochi (and later the Furby) phenomenon was that people who knew better began to feel guilty about their behaviour towards a small cheap and simple toy that could not even speak.

The brief history of those toys says a great deal about people and their ability to create and transfer their affections.

This phenomenon was almost certainly a sign of what is to come and of how easily people will find it to identify with and care for automata that can talk and appear to remember who they are talking to.

Simple robot home helps are already available in Japan, but we only have to look at them and their hard plastic exteriors and their few tinny phrases about starting the dishwasher to realise that this is almost certainly not how an agreeable artificial companion should be.

For information about the Companions project visit www.companions-project.org/ This page is compiled by The Oxford Trust: www.oxtrust.org.uk