Inside Anybots And The Rise of Human-Size Telepresence Robots

I like this idea; but I can't see it working on a massive commercial scale quite yet. The Robot is a bit impersonal in my mind.

As I see it there are three main uses; monitoring a remote office by a manager, teleconferencing and "the boss is working from home again".

The latter doesn't strike me as a good boss. Remote monitoring is a reasonable use but it seems like a lot of money to achieve that. And teleconferencing; well, it seems a solid market, but studies have shown that people still much prefer voice calls to video chat - so this seems another hard sell in reality.

There is a future in this though.

I suspect you could get something almost as good with a tabletop-sized bot. Just ask one of your colleagues to bring it to the meeting and leave it on the table.

Something so small and easily moved could be designed to be completely unintimidating, which could be an advantage in some situations.

It's an interesting idea, but I can't see these specific robots being too useful yet. They just don't offer any solid advantages over other long distance communication methods. Still, it's a step in the right direction.