Hello from the very cold United States, Oli!
Looking forward to reading more about your project!
My current project is Anna. Until now, she was an electric wheelchair based robot (you can see her in some of my previous posts). Now that the testing phase is over, I'm moving her to a recently completed home-built platform. She already responds to voice commands and can be controlled remotely via my phone or laptop (including live audio/video feed) over the internet. Once I get everything working on the new chassis, I'll be working on gesture recognition through her Kinect unit, then working on some conversational and behavioral skills for her. She already verbally harasses my wife's cat and my nieces using image recognition.

John