Are they really though? What makes a sex robot?

In her recent blog post, Scaachi Koul who is a senior culture writer for BuzzFeed News and is based in Toronto writes about the sex toy and sex doll market.

Below are some excerpts from the article with comments from our Chief Future Officer, Amy J. - feel free to join the discussion on our Twitter profile and follow the link for the full article.

Women rule the (sex toy) world

Scaachi Koul makes an interesting observation:

“While we might not be in the market for sex robots designed specifically for us, women consumers otherwise dominate the sex toy market. We buy strap-ons and vibrators and plugs and whips and clamps and saddles and rabbits and edible lotions and every lubricant known to humankind and items ribbed for my pleasure!!!! and anything that warms and cools and buzzes and hums. Women are perverts. We like options. All the women I know have a bedside table filled with contraptions that make having to actually communicate with another person in order to receive any kind of pleasure basically unnecessary. It makes me wonder why we ever even go outside.”

This might be pretty accurate, except we wouldn’t go as far as calling all (?) women ‘perverts’.

About those ‘sex robots’

“Harmony, the first speaking, AI-powered female sex robot made by RealDoll’s offshoot company, Realbotix, which rolled off the assembly line this past July, is far from perfect. She speaks in a stilted way, she can’t actually “see” you because she doesn’t yet have cameras for eyes, and she seems to be programmed to “peak horniness” as her main personality trait — but she’s a lot better than Henry, her male counterpart. Henry is still in development: His airbrushed five o’clock shadow is spot-on; his ability to communicate with any sense of spontaneity is not. So far, he does little more than laugh nervously when you speak to him, before saying your sense of humor is a bit too cutting and admitting that you scare him. If I need a fragile man to be afraid of me, I can generally get that for a lot less than the $8,000 these talking robot heads start at. (Bodies sold separately and without robotics.) “

This is the actual state of affairs with sexbots. The ‘sex robot’ claim sells well but we are always skeptical and prefer not to make too much promises. By the time we can feel comfortable calling one of our products an actual ‘love robot’ or ‘sexbot’ many new dolls will be made and sold. For now, it is the human imagination, our customer’s creativity that brings the magic to our business. It is the intangible not the obvious. Just because some dolls can roll their eyes, moan and generate sound that was pre-programmed by an engineer, that does not make ‘her’ a robot. Also the AI is in such an early stage of application we wouldn’t jump the bandwagon talking about AI dolls any soon.

Let the imagination do the work, just like in the good old times, when there were no cell phones, no cameras and you had to actually imagine your sweetheart if you were apart. or something like that…