Overheard/Underheard

Sometimes the responsibility of preparing each installment of Overheard/Underheard becomes a terrible—and relatively disgusting/pornographic—descent into madness. Some mornings I wake up and just feel dirty. I am, of course, referring to some of the Creepy Talking Robots (CTRs) we have profiled in the past: strange, vaguely sexual gynoids with feathered hair and trampy speech recognition engines.

However, nothing—I repeat NOTHING—I have ever encountered in regard to CTRs prepared me for the absolute horror I am about to unleash on the World of Speech Technology: the lurid nightmare that is Roxxxy.

Who is Roxxxy, you ask? And why the triple-x name spelling? Because she is the world’s first Creepy Talking Sex Robot (CTSR). Built by New Jersey-based TrueCompanion and engineered by Douglass Hines—founder/president of the company and a former artificial intelligence engineer at Bell Labs—Roxxxy TrueCompanion is described by the company as the “world’s first life-size robotic girlfriend.” And, yes: She talks.

After two years and between $500,000 and $1 million in development costs, Roxxxy made her debut earlier this month at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas—where, I have no doubt, she made quite a splash.

Standing at 5-feet-7-inches tall and weighing in at 120 pounds, Roxxxy has flesh-like synthetic skin and an artificial intelligence engine that can learn her owner/boyfriend’s likes and dislikes. Featuring an articulated skeleton, Roxxxy can be positioned by her owner/boyfriend, but can’t move her limbs independently. The same can be said, of course, for a dead body. But show me a dead body that boasts a mechanical heart that powers an internal liquid cooling system. Show me a dead body that can talk.

That’s right, Roxxxy—who offers five different personalities, including Wild Wendy, Frigid Farrah, and S&M Susan—can, according to TrueCompanion’s Web site, “carry on a discussion, express her love to you, and be your loving friend. She can talk to you, listen to you, and feel your touch.” 

Roxxxy, who is priced at about $6,500, also features a program enabling her to talk with her owner/boyfriend via an internal loudspeaker, an updatable vocabulary, and customizable hair color, eye color, skin color, and breast size.

In the interest of quality journalism, I visited the definitely not-suitable-for-work www.truecompanion.com Web site, which we should warn you is rather explicit. Unfortunately, doing so set off all sorts of alarms here at the Home Office. But, I am happy to say, I was not fired—only issued several written warnings and told by my editor to “look at that sick [expletive] on your own time.”

However, my research was not in vain. I can report that TrueCompanion will soon be offering a male version of its CTSR named Rocky. And, like Roxxxy, Rocky will doubtlessly live up to the product’s tagline and be “always turned on and ready to talk or play.”