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Salamanca City Central School District is spending nearly $58,000 on a lifelike robot and AI tutor. Whether it improves learning remains to be seen.
A rural New York school district will become the flagship education test for a humanoid-robot company that acknowledges it has no empirical evidence its lifelike machine improves learning.
Salamanca City Central School District is spending $57,590 to put Sally, a stationary, female-presenting robot with silicone skin and long brown hair, inside its high school this fall. The robot will assist students studying AI and robotics, while an accompanying digital tutor will remember their earlier interactions, help with homework and provide support outside school. New York Focus first reported details of the purchase.
Realbotix calls Salamanca its “flagship deployment.” CEO Andrew Kiguel tells Inc. that feedback from the district will shape how the company uses its robots in schools and “help guide us in the future.”
Superintendent Mark Beehler is more circumspect about what the machine can accomplish.
“The problems the robot can solve are limited,” he tells Inc. Beehler says its value lies in giving rural students first-hand exposure to emerging technology, expanding their awareness of potential careers and preparing them for a rapidly changing workforce.
But Realbotix is entering the classroom before it knows whether its most distinctive feature—a humanlike physical presence—actually improves learning.
“AI lives behind a screen for most people,” Kiguel says. Realbotix’s internal testing, he adds, suggests that giving AI an identity makes it more “approachable and relatable.”
Realbotix’s corporate history includes the adult-products market. Realbotix LLC and Abyss Creations, which operates the RealDoll brand, currently share a publicly traded parent.
The company says the businesses have separate personnel, management, facilities, operations, and products. It says Sally is a newly manufactured M-Series robot built solely by Realbotix employees and incorporates no RealDoll blueprints, adult-product hardware, or Abyss Creations personnel.
Realbotix also says Matt McMullen, who founded its earlier humanoid businesses after decades developing silicone dolls and adult robotic companions, has no role in the company’s commercial robotics operations, the Optio platform, or the Salamanca project. But Realbotix announced as recently as February 19 that McMullen would become chief creative officer, and its current executive team and investor pages still list him as founder and CCO.
What does the body add?
Human likeness—not mobility—is Realbotix’s central product bet. Sally will remain seated, but can move its upper body and produce facial expressions. The company is wagering that a recognizable face, voice, and physical presence will make students more willing to engage with AI than another chatbot on a screen.
Students will enter anonymous identification codes when using Sally, allowing the system to retrieve earlier exchanges and continue where they left off. Kiguel says the robot will be restricted to approved STEM material rather than drawing broadly from the internet.
Much of the everyday tutoring, however, will happen through Optio, the accompanying laptop-based avatar. Students can upload photographs of homework, request personalized lessons, and receive translations in more than 100 languages. The district’s agreement includes an initial three-month Optio subscription, potentially giving Realbotix recurring software revenue beyond the robot sale.
Beehler says the robot also carries a $1,990 annual fee for software updates and use of the controller through which the district loads content.
That leaves the core question unanswered: What educational benefit comes from the $50,000-plus physical robot rather than the software alone?
Kiguel says Salamanca will help Realbotix find out. The company will adjust how the robot is used based on feedback from the school. “This will help guide us in the future,” he says.
Ryan Schaaf, a professor of educational technology at Notre Dame of Maryland University, cautions that a new and unusual robot will almost certainly command students’ attention at first. But “novelty is not the same as learning,” he tells Inc.
Schaaf says Salamanca should compare students using Sally with those using Optio on a laptop and those using neither. The district should measure academic growth, retention, time on task, and whether engagement continues after the robot stops feeling new.
Salamanca is planning a less rigorous evaluation. Beehler says most measures will be qualitative, relying on feedback from students and teachers. Quantitative data will be limited to anonymized usage information, including logins and time spent using the systems.
“The most important question is not whether students are fascinated by the robot,” Schaaf says, “but whether the robot helps a good teacher design and execute a more meaningful learning experience.”
Schools race ahead of the rules
Salamanca isn’t the first school to try a humanoid. Schools have experimented with smaller robots such as Pepper for years, while San Diego charter network Altus Schools recently spent $500,000 on two ChatGPT-powered Ameca robots.
Salamanca’s pilot goes further by combining a highly human-like physical machine with stored interaction histories tied to individual student codes and a digital tutor designed for use at home.
The deployment arrives as AI is already spreading through schools. Six in 10 public-school teachers reported using AI for their work during the 2024-25 academic year, but only 18 percent say that they had received formal guidance from administrators about how to use it.
Kiguel says Realbotix will not see student conversations, which will remain encrypted and controlled by school administrators and teachers. The system will direct students who mention self-harm to seek help from an appropriate adult, he says.
Beehler says speaking with Sally will be voluntary: Students who don’t want to interact with the robot will not be required to do so. He says interaction data will remain within the district and its cloud services, with nothing shared with Realbotix, and that Salamanca is working with state education officials on data-privacy compliance.
He didn’t specify how long students’ interaction histories will be retained, who can access or delete them, or whether parents will receive a formal opportunity to opt their children out. The district also has not explained how a system using anonymized codes would connect an urgent safety concern to a particular student.
Schaaf says Sally’s humanlike appearance could heighten those concerns by encouraging students to attribute understanding, authority, or empathy to software that does not possess those qualities. And its answers may appear more credible than the same information presented as text—even when they are wrong.
“The physical form is therefore not merely cosmetic,” he says. Students should be taught that Sally is an AI interface, Schaaf adds—not a teacher, friend, counselor, or unquestionable authority.
A small contract with big stakes
Salamanca is paying for the purchase with district funds, Beehler says.
The contract is significant for Realbotix, which generated $225,000 in revenue in its latest quarter while spending $1.75 million on operations. The contract price equals roughly one-quarter of that quarterly revenue, although it was signed after the reporting period and may not yet have been recognized.
Realbotix LLC is also set to be acquired by Nasdaq-listed Onconetix. Realbotix says the transaction is intended to separate the commercial robotics business further from Abyss Creations, although Simulacra would initially receive between 75 percent and 90 percent of Onconetix’s fully diluted shares at closing. Existing Realbotix Corp. shareholders could continue to own shares in both public companies.
The pilot carries different stakes for Salamanca. The district serves roughly 1,300 students, 79 percent of whom are economically disadvantaged. Nearly one-third identify as American Indian or Alaska Native.
New York State Senator George Borrello tells Inc. that assistive technology could expand access to tutoring and other services in rural communities where resources are scarce. But he says Salamanca should approach the experiment with “an open mind and a healthy degree of skepticism.”
“If this pilot demonstrates that it improves learning, expands access to academic support, and does so safely and responsibly, then it may prove to be a worthwhile tool,” Borrello says. “If it does not, then the district should be willing to say so and adjust course.”
This post originally appeared at inc.com.
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