Your Next Colleague Could be a Robot!

NEW YORK (CBS) Doing work from home is nothing new, but imagine you could work from anywhere in the world and still roam around the office talking and bumping into colleagues you want to see. A new Silicon Valley company called Anybots is making that futuristic concept a reality. Just put your Anybot in a wireless location, login from any computer and tada! You can use your computer to control where it goes, and you can even speak through it.

I spoke to founder Trevor Blackwell about why this is a trend we might see in the workplace soon. (Watch at left)

Your virtual self comes at a price though. Each Anybot is tagged at $15,000. While the concept of interacting as your robot self at work might seem outlandish, according to Blackwell, "People seem to forget about the robot part of it after a few minutes and relate to the person behind the robot ... A number of our early customers have global distributed companies. They have engineering operations in California and manufacturing in Asia, so the engineers are always having to fly back and forth, and it's hard on their relationships, so they're really happy to have a way of being able to see what's going on at the factory without having to fly all the time."

So are companies like Anybots trying to replace human contact and create a future where our workplace is filled with robots? Blackwell said, "We never want to completely replace meeting people in person, just replace the day-to-day mundane things through a robot."