Lonely using virtual assistants for sexually explicit conversations

Men are using virtual assistants to have sexually explicit conversations, it had been claimed.

Some teenagers and "truckers" who did not  have partners were also developing feelings for female and male-voiced chatbots such as Siri, according to one expert.

According to Ilya Eckstein, the chief executive of Robin Labs, his company's virtual assistant – Robin, was used by some men for up to 300 conversations a day.

He told The Times that mostly teenagers and truckers who did not have girlfriends were turning to the virtual world.

"This happens because people are lonely and bored.... It is a symptom of our society," he said. "As well as the people who want to talk dirty, there are men who want a deeper sort of relationship or companionship."

Eckstein went on to elaborate what these lovelorn men were using their virtual company for: "[they] want to flirt, they want to dream about a subservient girlfriend, or even a sexual slave," he told Quartz.

Chatbots had been promised as the future of human-machine interaction as they were  designed to understand normal speech and respond in kind. A bot could handle everything from call centres to pizza orders.

In April, social network Facebook launched a feature to develop chatbots for Facebook Messenger and "tens of thousands" of developers like Robin Labs were working on them.

According to Deborah Harrison, a writer for Microsoft's Cortana, who spoke at the Virtual Assistant Summit earlier this year "a good chunk of the volume of early-on inquiries" were about the chatbot's sex life.