Realbotix, the sex robot arm of the RealDoll empire, last year underwent a major rebranding as a more mainstream humanoid robot manufacturer – aiming for a potential market in hospitality, care homes, education and such like. However, they never disavowed their goal of producing an ‘AI companion’ down the line, and the meantime, they would be more attractive to investors and could start generating profits from their new mainstream markets. To that end they recently announced that their robot could now speak fluently in 15 different languages, along with a number of different dialects.
In a press release, the company stated that this multilingual capability allows the robot to “connect with people across a wide range of industries and cultural contexts.”
Designed for various people-centric industries such as travel, tourism, and health care, the lifelike humanoid would fill a critical gap between staff and patients or visitors and improve the overall consumer experience by providing immediate assistance in natural speech.
The robots of Realbotix are not able to walk, so are a long way behind some of the companies that have been recently making such amazing progress, with viral videos of the likes of the Tesla Optimus dancing highlighting their mobility. However, the strength of Realbotix is in creating human-like robots, not just humanoid but substitute humans.
The robots of Realbotix are so expensive, that only corporate buyers would likely be interested in them at the present time. Indeed, on their website no price is given, except a quote of $22K for simply customizing an existing robot (on top of the basic price, whatever that is).
Something very similar to the Realbotix robots are available in China, and sold in the West through CloudClimax in the UK for £42,000 (around $57K). They too are powered by a cloud based LLM and can ‘get around’ via a wheeled base, and are capable of facial movements and not much else. At the same site you can buy a number of ‘sex robots‘ that you can actually have sex with, and are priced at around $3K, but they are really just sex dolls with a ChatGPT voice installed in their heads.
