Gadgets wow crowds at world's top high-tech fair

READ Yahoo! News: "HANOVER, Germany (AFP) – Robots that teach Chinese, computers controlled by moving the eyes and flying alarm clocks were among the weird and wonderful gadgets wowing crowds Wednesday at the world's top high-tech fair.

As the IT sector seeks to bounce back after a disastrous 2009, firms sought to woo punters at this year's CeBIT fair in northern Germany with fun and futuristic inventions ranging from the mind-boggling to the downright silly.

Learning Chinese but finding it tough to find people to practice with?

Meet Amy, the beautiful and uber-smart talking robot with 400,000 sentences at her command and a brain that is programmed with the entire knowledge of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Using artificial intelligence and voice recognition, Amy can chat for hours with her owner, without ever getting bored or tired and never running out of conversation.

About 35 centimetres (14 inches) tall, with a screen for a face and a laser arm to project her image onto a wall, Amy is due to hit the market towards the end of 2010, said Bruce Han from viewmotion, the South Korean firm that created her.

'At the moment, she can only speak Chinese and English, but we hope in a few years to have French, German, Italian and Japanese,' he said.

Big crowds also gathered around the 'eye tracking' stand run by Tobii Technology, a Swedish company.

Its system allows users to control computers using just the motion of their eyes, from scrolling through a selection of music tracks to enabling market researchers to monitor what consumers look at first from a shelf of products.

A similar technology was unveiled by the Fraunhofer Institute, whereby users can point at a screen from up to 20 metres (65 feet) away and 'touch' icons or control a cursor just as they would with a touch-screen.

With music devices like the iPod and MP3 players now so common, several firms used the CeBIT to showcase new ways of enjoying music on the move.

The 'Tunebug Vibe' is a small device that music-lovers can plug into their iPod, place on any surface -- a pizza box, a table, a wall, a ceiling -- and it instantly becomes a speaker, converting the vibrations of the music into sound.

There was plenty of offer for the practical joker, too. Getdigital.de, whose company slogan is 'gadgets and more for geeks', offered a tiny remote control device that can surreptitiously turn on or off almost any European television."