 Hey, if you haven't already noticed, I'm British, I'm from Britland and actually I'm still there right now. My bosses decided that I should get to know people in our New York office so they got me this thing. It's a telepresence robot. The people who make it say it's going to be all the rage in the offices of the future so we thought we'd test it now as well. Now telepresence robots have been around for a few years but they've not yet caught on. This particular model is made by a company named Double Robotics and it's a good template for the genre. They're basically screens on wheels that you move around either with an app or in a browser. You log in basically just like a Skype call and then you're good to go. In this thing I can move around as we're doing now, kind of shakily. I can go up with the screen like this and I can also go down as well and I can also turn around. This is the slowest pirouette you've ever seen. Here we are, still happening and there we are. We're back in. Hey, but are telepresence robots actually any good when it comes to being in office? Well yes and no. The times I did work using the bot, like talking to my editors about a story for example, were great. We sat in a room together and I got to do the whole reading facial expressions, uninterpreting tone of voice thing that I never have over email. But this was just a face to face conversation, we might as well have been talking over Skype. And when it came to actually moving about the office, like now, things were a little less smooth. For a start it feels a bit weird to make people talk to a robot like it's a normal conversation. You know, everyone's just thinking wow, this is deeply, deeply silly, but they have to pretend like it's not. The bot also has the motor skills of a toddler, which is good in some ways because people felt sympathetic for me. They picked me up when I fell over and they made sure I didn't roll into any walls or anything. However, I'd hate to use this thing as a boss and try and tell someone off. It just wouldn't stick. So this is the thing about telepresence bots. They're just not serious devices and you wouldn't want your whole presence in an office to be based on using one. They're fun yes and they're satisfying to use, but I don't think they'll ever be more than a niche product for emergencies or special occasions. If you want to work remotely, you've got a wealth of options and you don't have to wait around for people to open doors for you.