Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. Virtual Reality
  4. News

Realdoll is building a fleet of AI-powered sex robots with customizable personalities

By
Add as a preferred source on Google

Sex doll manufacturer Realdoll is dipping its toe (and we don’t want to know which other body parts) into the world of artificial intelligence and robotics with a forthcoming robot sex assistant that promises to form a “real bond” with its, erm, users.

The new system is made up of several components, which will roll out over the course of this year and next. It will begin with the Harmony AI app, scheduled for release on April 15, followed by the company’s “first robotic head systems,” set to launch by the end of the year. A virtual reality platform will ship sometime in 2018.

Recommended Videos

It’s not going to be cheap, mind you: the head alone will set you back $10,000. No pun intended.

“We are developing the Harmony AI system to add a new layer to the relationships people can have with a Realdoll,” Realdoll CEO Matt McMullen told Digital Trends. “Many of our clients rely on their imaginations to a great degree to impose imagined personalities on their dolls. With the Harmony AI, they will be able to actually create these personalities instead of having to imagine them. They will be able to talk to their dolls, and the AI will learn about them over time through these interactions, thus creating an alternative form of relationship. The scope of conversations possible with the AI is quite diverse, and not limited to sexual subject matter.”

From the sound of things, the Harmony system may be back-compatible with some of the existing dolls the company offers, although we’re sure that more clarification will be made available at a later date. With the AI system, users can choose from a range of personality traits (kind, sexual, shy, naive, brainy, etc.) and then choose how strongly these characteristics are engrained in their new acquaintance.

“We feel that this system, and this technology, will appeal to a segment of the population that struggles with forming intimate connections with other people, whether by choice or circumstance,” McMullen continued. “Furthermore, it will likely attract those who seek to explore uncharted and new territory where relationships and sex are concerned.”

We do worry about the resale value, though.

Luke Dormehl
Luke Dormehl
Former Contributor
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
Topics
Bacteria could be the secret sauce to keeping your computers cool
Scientists find bacteria can grow thermal materials that outperform current cooling tech.
The Zotac RTX 5070 Ti Amp Extreme Infinity plugged into a white gaming PC

Your PC and laptop runs hotter every year, especially now that AI tools and heavy software push it harder than ever. Heat is a real bottleneck for performance, which is why people have gone to wild lengths to solve it, like strapping an actual ice machine to an RTX GPU. A new study points to a far less extreme fix for this problem, and it involves bacteria (via TechXplore).

Researchers have developed a new way to grow thermal interface materials, the substances that sit between a chip and its cooling system to help heat escape faster. The process involves feeding bacteria sugar and metal ions, letting the microbes build the material naturally instead of relying on traditional chemical manufacturing.

Read more
Bored of reading papers? This AI tool turns them into TikTok-like videos
PaperTok brings academic papers to people with short attention spans
Head, Person, Face

Academic papers aren't what you'd consider a fun read. For the average person, the dense, long, and field-specific language-filled papers can be quite intimidating to get into. These are usually packaged as PDFs that look like they were designed to test your willpower. A group of University of Washington researchers thinks there may be a better way to get that work in front of regular people. They are turning the papers into short-form videos.

The tool is called PaperTok, and it uses AI to help researchers convert academic papers into short, social-friendly videos. Think TikTok, except the idea is to explain research instead of sharing brain-rotting content. The best part? PaperTok is building a platform around scientists and researchers who are involved in the process, rather than simply using AI to summarize these papers.

Read more
As AI voices get harder to spot, ElevenLabs adopts Google’s SynthID to help you sniff the fakes
Artificial Intelligence

There was a time when spotting AI-generated content was almost a game. Images came with extra fingers, chatbots wrote like overly enthusiastic interns, and synthetic voices had an unmistakable robotic edge. Those days are disappearing fast.

Today, AI voices can laugh, whisper, pause naturally, and even sound emotional enough to fool many listeners. That’s exciting for creators, but it’s also creating a growing trust problem. If you can’t tell whether a clip is real or AI-generated, how do you know what to believe?

Read more