When will a robot do my laundry?
Tech Life
BBC
4.3 • 227 Ratings
🗓️ 13 January 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How close are we to humanoid robots in the home? A flurry of new robots, designed to look like us, have been revealed recently, with many in Silicon Valley excited that this is the next big leap in AI. But many humanoid robots still struggle with the basics, such as picking up a glass or watering a plant. The BBC’s cyber correspondent Joe Tidy meets some of these robots and asks: Will we really let them into our homes in the next few years?
Presenter: Chris Vallance and Joe Tidy Producers: Tom Quinn and Imran Rahman-Jones
(Photo: Joe Tidy looks at a white humanoid robot wearing a red baseball cap, looking back at him, inside a domestic kitchen setting)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, and good news, |
| 0:09.5 | Your Dead to Me, is back for a new series. |
| 0:11.6 | Here we go. |
| 0:12.1 | Yes, we'll explore Emperor Nero's notorious reign with Professor Marybeard and Patton Oswald. |
| 0:16.9 | I would not want my daughter having the remote control, not alone an empire. |
| 0:21.0 | We'll dissect the decadent life of Philippe Duke-Dolion with Tom Allen. |
| 0:24.8 | I've often tried to pretend I'm an aristocrat and being very quickly knocked down. |
| 0:29.1 | And there'll be so much more with comedians like Olga Koch, Mike Mosniak and Rihelina. |
| 0:33.0 | I'm excited. |
| 0:33.7 | You're dead to me. |
| 0:34.5 | The comedy podcast that takes history seriously. |
| 0:37.0 | Listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:40.4 | Hello and welcome to TechLife on the BBC World Service with me, Chris Valence, |
| 0:45.1 | and for a special episode with the BBC cyber correspondent Joe Tidy. |
| 0:49.7 | Hi, Joe. |
| 0:50.3 | Hi, Chris, great to be here, and we are talking about these guys. |
| 0:54.2 | Hi there, I'm Memo, your future home robot. I'm built to help with chores. |
| 0:58.9 | Last week, Tech Life was at the biggest consumer electronics show in the world, CES, in Las Vegas, |
| 1:04.6 | and there was no shortage of talking robots there. |
| 1:07.9 | That's right, this year there was a real focus on robot tech, which could help us. |
| 1:12.8 | We think about robots very differently. They're not here to replace physical human labor, |
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