Douglas Hines, founder of TrueCompanion, joined HuffPost Live on Wednesday to discuss the next frontier of sex: human-on-robot love. His company is best known for creating Roxxxy , a lifelike robot companion designed to look surprisingly like a real human woman and to communicate using programmed words and topics that can be geared toward the user's interests and can also be triggered by the physical sensations it receives.
"Sex only goes so far – then you want to be able to talk to the person," Hines said at a 2010 demonstration of the Roxxxy bot.
Hines, an artificial intelligence engineer, told HuffPost Live that he got the idea for the creating a humanoid companion after he lost a friend in the September 11 attacks. He said he wanted to develop a software application for the deceased's children that would "replicate" their father's personality. When he decided to monetize the concept, Hines found a natural market in the adult entertainment industry.
Today, TrueCompanion also makes a male version of its sex robot (Rocky) and is set to release a new product that Hines describes as a "scaled-down" version of the life-sized product. These range in price from $7,000 to $10,000.