It's a robot that recognizes each member of a family and sees to each of their unique needs.

You can call it a robot butler or a robot personal assistant, and the robot does both jobs equally well.

World, meet Jibo, the brainchild of Cynthia Breazeal, an associate professor at MIT and a computer geek specializing in advanced robotics.

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Prof. Breazeal describes Jibo as an "emotive robot" built specifically to improve the lives of the family that owns it and to become part of that family.

She said Jibo is the world's first "Family Robot."

Jibo has the unique ability to recognize each family member in a household. It can, therefore, assist each member individually by seeing to their unique needs.

Need to check your email? Just tell Jibo.  Hungry? Tell Jibo and he'll go online to order your favorite snack. Having a party? Jibo takes on that boring but necessary chore of snapping everyone's photo. And a lot of partygoers will certainly love to have their selfies with Jibo.

If you decide you need more than one Jibo in the family, that's fine, too.

Jibo's are designed to talk to each other. So you can ask Jibo to remind your mom to pick up some groceries and her Jibo will remind her about it.

A special ability of Jibo is that it can adapt according to the needs and habits of family members. It uses a special algorithms that help it to learn and grow.

Physically, Jibo looks real cute, as the photo will show you. That "face" of Jibo's flashes messages and talks to you. Jibo's body has multiple sensors that allow it to react differently, depending on the way you touch it. 

Hug Jibo and the social robot display a big heart on its face screen.

Jibo sort of looks like a small electric fan or an Earth-bound version of "Eve," the female flying robot from the cartoon movie, Wall-E.

Jibo won't be sold until late next year, but that hasn't prevented hundreds of people from pre-ordering it. By that time, many of Jibo's cute features should be working fine.

The pre-order price is US$500.

Tagsjibo, family robot