Meet Fred. (He’s the one on the left.) Fred is a remarkably lifelike robot—one of many being built by Engineered Arts, a company in the United Kingdom. These days, all sorts of robots are part of everyday life (see graph), from self-operating vacuums to machines that prepare food. Most perform simple, repetitive tasks, but Fred is different. Called a Mesmer robot, he’s amazingly complex and was designed to be as expressive as a real person. A human using a laptop can control his movements and make him talk, and his software ensures that he automatically maintains eye contact and makes natural facial expressions while he holds a conversation. While many of the company’s robots are designed to entertain in tourist attractions—such as Madame Tussauds wax museums—some, like Fred, are also used to study how people react to different kinds of robots. Although many of us may find realistic robots unnerving, these machines are likely to grow more common as robots continue to take on human tasks around the globe.