Robotics company is turning its sexbots into AI teachers
Realbotix owns RealDoll. Two years ago it was a crypto company renting Metaverse land. This fall it’s putting a humanoid robot named Sally in a chair in a Salamanca, New York classroom to interact with kids. Its own press release says the point is “strengthening credibility” for AI.
Realbotix is putting a humanoid robot in a public school classroom in Salamanca, New York.
Realbotix owns RealDoll.
Those two sentences are both true and everything else follows from them.
The company’s last four years
In April 2024, a company called Tokens.com acquired Simulacra, the Las Vegas parent of RealDoll, which has spent decades making hyperrealistic sex dolls and later sex robots.
Tokens.com’s previous business was helping customers use cryptocurrency to rent digital land in the Metaverse.
Crypto to sex dolls to classroom robots, in about four years. Whatever’s hot, they’re in it.
What Sally actually is
The robot is named Sally. She’s brown-haired, she can’t walk, and she’ll be sitting in a chair in a classroom directly interacting with children.
She runs Realbotix’s Optio AI, which the company pitches as a teacher’s assistant and at-home tutor, inside a Realbotix M-Series humanoid body, the platform built by the people who build RealDoll.
From the press release: “Students interact with personalized avatars trained in district curriculum, delivering educationally regulated support, concept reinforcement, individual tutoring, and 24/7 homework support across multiple languages.”
Per New York Focus, the AI inside Sally will remember conversations.
The press release says the quiet part
Buried in the announcement: “The platform provides scalable AI assistance for both students and educators while strengthening credibility for AI, robots, and STEM education.“
Strengthening credibility. For AI and robots.
That’s not a description of an educational benefit. That’s a description of a marketing objective, printed in the document announcing the program.
There’s also this: “we anticipate benefits we cannot yet fully foresee.” Which is a sentence you write when you don’t have the foreseeable ones.
Where they’re doing it
Salamanca has a population of 5,929. It sits on Seneca Nation land in Cattaraugus County, and it’s a district without the resources to be picky about free technology.
Nobody’s piloting Sally in Scarsdale.
New York is currently moving the other direction
The timing is something.
In May, the New York State United Teachers union called for strict limits on artificial intelligence and screen time in schools. Earlier this month, New York City Public Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels froze educational technology purchasing entirely until the system finalizes its AI guidance later this summer.
Parents across the state have been organizing for tighter oversight of exactly this kind of thing.
So while the largest district in America stops buying edtech until it figures out what its rules are, a district of six thousand people is getting a humanoid robot from a company that was selling Metaverse real estate in 2024.
The honest case for it
Rural districts have real problems, and this deserves stating fairly.
Salamanca can’t staff every subject. It can’t offer round-the-clock tutoring. If a kid there needs help with algebra at 9 p.m. and there’s an AI that speaks their language and knows the curriculum, that’s not nothing, and the objection can’t just be “gross company, no thanks.”
The district said yes. It wasn’t done to them.
And a company pivoting from adult products to something else isn’t automatically disqualifying. Plenty of technology has crossed over from industries nobody wants printed on a school bus.
The part that isn’t about sex dolls
The strongest objection here has nothing to do with what RealDoll makes.
It’s that an AI which remembers conversations with children is being deployed by a firm that was in a completely different business two years ago, in a town too small and too poor to negotiate terms, as a project its own press release describes as a credibility exercise.
The sex doll thing is the headline. The data on the kids is the story.
Sally can’t stand up, can’t leave the chair, and can’t tell you what happens to what she hears. Neither, so far, can anyone else.
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Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
Hat Tips:
New York Focus (July 14, 2026), the originating reporting, verified the Salamanca City School District’s plan to launch a humanoid robot in the classroom, Realbotix being a Toronto-based robotics company formerly known as Tokens.com which had helped customers use cryptocurrency to rent digital land in the Metaverse, its April 2024 acquisition of Simulacra, the Las Vegas parent company behind RealDoll, RealDoll’s decades of hyperrealistic sex dolls and later sex robots, that the AI will remember conversations, and the state context including the New York State United Teachers union’s May call for strict limits on AI and screen time in schools, New York City Public Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels’ recent educational technology purchasing freeze pending AI guidance, and parent groups organizing for stronger oversight
Kotaku (July 16, 2026), verified the program details and press release language — the Optio AI pitched as a teacher’s assistant or at-home tutor paired with a Realbotix M-Series humanoid robot, the press release describing “personalized avatars trained in district curriculum, delivering educationally regulated support, concept reinforcement, individual tutoring, and 24/7 homework support across multiple languages,” the M-Series using “natural conversation, facial expressions and real-time interaction,” the line that the platform provides “scalable AI assistance for both students and educators while strengthening credibility for AI, robots, and STEM education,” the statement that “we anticipate benefits we cannot yet fully foresee,” the robot named Sally being unable to move and seated in a chair while directly interacting with children, and Salamanca’s population of 5,929 in Cattaraugus County on Seneca Nation land