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like a tiny ant compared to the immensity of the universe.
No, it really is me.
The reason I sounded strangely robotic is just my producer was playing around with my voice.
But it gives you a clue as to what we'll be talking about today.
That, as you may have guessed, is the sound of washing up.
But it's a robot doing the work rather than a human.
The robot has been put together by one of my guests today,
Professor Usman Roshan from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and his team from his 7x household robotics company.
We'll hear from Usman in a moment,
but first let's see what kind of domestic robot helpers would world service listeners prefer.
Lots of listeners told us on Facebook that they would like help with all the basic chores from cleaning toilets to ironing,
but there were some more imaginative answers too.
I wish an inventor would create a little drone that could fly around my house carefully and do the dusting.
I'd like to see a robotic vacuum cleaner with a long, snake-like neck.
It would probably be equipped with a camera, LED,
lidar and AI to go into the small nooks and crannies where a normal robotic vacuum cannot go.
The AI would ensure that only dirt is sucked up and not a misplaced valuable.
And this long dink would move of its own accord and go up to the ceiling and might find spider webs.
But perhaps there could be an option to not ingest the spiders but to set them free later on.