A year ago, Silicon Valley robotics company Anybots started selling their telepresence robot QB. Now they have started a service called "AnyLobby."
AnyLobby is a staffing service, but instead of sending you a person, they will send you a robot - in this case QB. But it is not just a robot. It comes with a "robot personality" who will be driving the robot from elsewhere, in some cases hundreds of miles away. The robot personality will work as your receptionist or assistant, and a full time robot receptionist will be there for you 40 hours a week for $2,400 a month.
I got to meet Angela Ward, one of the robot personalities, at Anybots last week. She lives in Fort Mill, South Carolina, a suburban town outside of Charlotte, a few time zones away from where Anybots is. I talked to her through the screen/camera/microphone on QB.
"We can do a lot of things," Angela says. QB doesn't have arms, but thanks to digital technology, she doesn't have any trouble scanning the fax and printing documents. The only thing she can't do is provide her signature when a package arrives, but the companies she works for have set up protocols for that - "Call Bob when there's a package. "
If it's a low traffic lobby, Angela can handle multiple locations at once. Before becoming a robot personality, she used to be a manager at a computer training company. Her background is "helpful but not necessary" in operating the robot. The technology is easy to use, she says. (You can test drive the QB here if you are interested, which is also something Anybots started recently.)
"We can bring different personalities and different expertise to the table through the same robot," says Trevor Blackwell, Founder of Anybots. Since the very beginning of Anybots he had wanted to create a service around his robots. Currently there are 3 companies that have signed up for AnyLobby and one is Elance (which is like the Ebay of services), according to Trevor.
Oftentimes robots are thought as something that can take away jobs, but Angela disagrees. "That is not the case here. It is creating jobs for small towns with high unemployment rates."
But isn't it taking away jobs from people that want to be receptionists in Silicon Valley? No, says Trevor. The main goal of AnyLobby is to provide "virtual employees" to companies that "otherwise would not have hired a receptionist," he says.
Angela has never met the Anybots team in person, but she "feels like she is a significant part of the team." Compared to showing up on a fixed screen, being a robot "makes a lot of difference in how you interact with each other."
(Trevor talking to Angela at Anybots)
