TrueCompanion

TrueCompanion built its name on Roxxxy, an interactive sex doll pitched as a robotic companion that the company unveiled at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas in 2010. Founded in 2001 by former AT&T Bell Labs AI engineer Douglas Hines, the outfit sold its products as life partners with voice recognition, speech synthesis, and five customizable personality profiles bearing names like Wild Wendy and Mature Martha. A male variant called Rocky was announced too. Roxxxy generated enormous buzz at launch, with claims of around 4,000 pre-orders and a price tag of $7,000 to $9,000 plus subscription fees. Verified commercial sales were another matter. As our look at the gap between sex robot hype and the actual hardware lays out, nobody could confirm a single delivery, and TrueCompanion became the textbook case of a sex robot company that talked a far bigger game than it ever shipped. The site went dark in late 2018, with no confirmed customer deliveries to its name. A reminder that in this category, the marketing almost always arrives years ahead of the product, if the product arrives at all.