The Autoblow has come a long way. First introduced in 2008 by Brian Sloan, the original website described it as “the male sex toy of the future.”
“Technology has brought people untold advancements in every aspect of life,” that site said. “We can drive cars, fly in airplanes, and explore the Internet. The technological advancement in male sex toys of this decade is the Autoblow.”
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The Autoblow AI+ is the successor of the 2018 Autoblow AI, an automatic jerkoff machine roughly the size and shape of a small box of wine with rounded edges. Put your dick in the Fleshlight-like sleeve, and a ring powered by a small motor will move up and down the shaft, massaging it in patterns and speeds you can choose in a connected web app. Like its predecessor, the AI+ is not “artificially intelligent,” but this model is internet-connected, at least, and features a downloadable blowjob library and voice command features.
Devices made for sucking off a penis are a bellwether for society’s views on sex toys in general. To keep their audiences interested, sex toy makers have had to increasingly make their toys more high tech, novel, internet-connected and cutting-edge. Autoblow isn’t immune to this trend, and with the Autoblow AI+, it’s testing new things, even if they’re kind of messy and imperfect—and Sloan still believes it’s the sex toy of the future.
Since I last tested the previous iteration in 2018, Sloan sent me an Autoblow AI+ unit to put through its paces.
Testing the Autoblow AI+
The test unit I received has a clear plastic case so I could see everything housed inside immediately: the Penis Gripper ring clasped around a wobbly, dangling tan silicone sleeve, with a human-like mouth perched at the opening. The product shipped to actual customers will be encased in white plastic, so the guts of the thing won’t be visible.
Once I hauled the Autoblow AI+ out of its box, I had to figure out how to get it connected to the internet. Unlike other internet connected sex toys, like the Lovense or We-Vibe, the Autoblow AI+ doesn’t have a downloadable companion app for controlling the device. This is an intentional choice by Sloan: the Google Play and Apple app stores strictly censors sexual speech, and referring repeatedly to blowjobs would almost certainly get him kicked off those platforms. So, the Autoblow AI+ uses a web app that took me about five minutes to set up correctly. I plugged it in, turned it on, and held the pause button until my phone detected a specific network in my WiFi settings, generated by the Autoblow. From there, I had to join that network, then my own home network, and copy and save a string of characters that’s the device token, then exit the setup. It’s all explained in a walkthrough video.
It’s not hard, but it does take a little effort and patience. Having watched every man in my life, past and present, immediately throw the instructions out with the boxes of anything that required assembly after opening it, I’m skeptical that the customers feverishly unpacking their new Autoblow AI+ will hang in there. But I also assume that the market audience for technologically complex fucktoys is more willing than most to spend the extra time.
Once it was set up, I didn’t fully trust that the machine would not inflict real damage on real penises, even if I could find someone willing to put theirs into it, so I grabbed a very ripe banana from my pantry for an ad-hoc safety test. (This is not an official rubric for manufacturers to qualify for ISO safety standards, but maybe it should be.)
On my first attempt at shoving the banana into the Autoblow’s waiting mouth, it became clear that doing this dry was not an option. I grabbed some lube (careful observers will note that it’s silicone-based lube, which is not ideal for a silicone toy, but not the cardinal sin it was once thought to be), slathered it onto the outside of the peel, and squeezed some into the sleeve for good measure, before trying again. This time it went in with a little purposeful yet gentle force.
I pressed various stroke-modes in the web app and played around with the sliders that control speed and position (focusing the stroker closer to the base, or farther down to the tip, or across the entire shaft). As the room started to smell strongly of overripe garbage, I thought for sure the banana was literally being masticated in there. But when I wrested it from the Autoblow’s mouth—those lips did not want to let go—the skin was unscathed. Not even bruised. Pleasantly surprised, I shoved it back in for round two.
The new model has a voice-control feature that’s still in beta development, the app takes care to warn me, that lets users say six different commands into their phone to control the movement: Go, Pause, Faster, Slower, Next, and Finish Me (I said this command in the Mortal Kombat voice every time). This feature is still buggy, and the system doesn’t understand every word on the first try. Yelling GO and FASTER at a sex toy was a new experience for me, and likely would be for most people: Voice controls aren’t a common feature in most toys on the market today, but Sloan is confident that this is where the market is headed.
Shouting these things didn’t feel very sexy, but then again, I didn’t have my genitals in it, either. I just felt like this:
While I had the web app voice command page open on my phone and the banana busily bobbed along in the machine, I watched a video about how to adjust the Penis Gripper (another feature that’s new to this model that allows users to reach into the device with a screwdriver to adjust for their own girth) on my laptop. Ideally, the app warns, you should only use the voice feature in a quiet room. The toy must have misheard the “Finish Me” command somewhere in the video’s instructions. The Autoblow started vigorously jerking the banana off—theoretically, to completion.
Once it was in that mode, it was impossible to make it stop; I was yelling “PAUSE! STOP! NO” and was ignored, the Autoblow too focused on its task and my fingers too lubed up to register on my phone’s screen to hit pause on the app. I had to shut it off with the on/off switch on the device.
My partner peeked his head into the room during this commotion, and said he thought I was in some kind of hostile Zoom meeting. Turns out I was just screaming at a slick silicone mouth that was actively deepthroating a whole banana.
Development of the Autoblow AI+
I called Sloan to tell him I’d spent the morning fucking his creation with fruit, and asked him about the development process of the new and improved Autoblow. He said he spent the last two years, including the entire Covid pandemic lockdown, improving on the design of the last Autoblow AI. It’s quieter than its predecessor, Sloan said (and I can confirm), and the Penis Gripper adjustments, he said, are novel within the industry and something his own customers specifically requested. Most notably, it can connect to the internet; the last model, despite having AI in the name, could not.
The voice commands feature, Sloan said, is “potentially the future of sex toys.”
“It’s just a natural way of controlling your masturbation session without thinking about buttons,” he said. The commands don’t require a wake word—you don’t have to say “Hey Autoblow,” before asking it to go faster, but you do have to have the voice commands tab open in the app—and it’s processed within one’s own phone or laptop speaker instead of transmitted to a server like commands to Alexa or Google Home devices are.
Aside from the new voice commands feature, he said, the downloadable blowjob library is the biggest new improvement. The web app comes preloaded with 10 blowjobs like “Full Stroke” and “Teasing Slow Edge,” that build on the last iteration’s “blowjob paper,” the work of a man in Serbia man and his small team, who annotated 109 hours of blowjob videos from 1,200 oral sex video clips, to recreate the motion in those clips. This new version allows users to download 17 different experiences beyond those first 10 and swap them out on the device, that are cycled through with physical buttons, or selected in the app.
“Sexual activity is an important driver of all life. It’s not a weird thing that only a few people like to do.”
For all of the earnest absurdity that comes with Fleshlights and all their fuck-sleeve kin, perhaps the most interesting thing about the Autoblow AI+ is what Sloan has refused to do with it. He won’t make an app for it to go in the Google Play or Apple app stores, as an act of protest against their archaic discrimination against all things sexual. Google doesn’t allow apps that “promote sexual content or profanity, including pornography, or any content or services intended to be sexually gratifying,” and Apple forbids “overtly sexual or pornographic material, defined as ‘explicit descriptions or displays of sexual organs or activities intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.’” These rules are a nightmare for anyone making or using apps that even hint at sexual content, from sex workers to toy developers to sex educators to social media platforms. Instead of cowing to these rules (which would make the toy easier to use), Sloan decided to avoid them entirely by developing it as a browser based web app.
“Sexual activity is an important driver of all life. It’s not a weird thing that only a few people like to do,” Sloan said. “Human sexual activity is a normal function of human beings. The fact that it’s been decided that if you’re going to use a cell phone—and [Google and Apple] control, between the two of them, 99 percent of the market—if you’re going to use a cell phone, they don’t want you to facilitate sexual activity with it? It’s like the most bizarre ‘fuck you’ to human kind, and I can’t wrap my mind around it.”
If he developed an app for Apple or Google, he’d have to omit words like “blowjob,” which is an unacceptable concession to him. “I would feel very uneasy not calling it what it is, because words affect your ideas, and your ideas affect your behavior. It’s a whole chain that we go through when we don’t call things what they are. So I refuse to do it.”
This, he admits, means the Autoblow AI+ requires more patience to set up, and might turn some people off. “The process isn’t just downloading an app, and clicking connect or something, right? But I don’t think that process is crazy-difficult,” Sloan said. That’s the tradeoff for opting out of the app stores. “We are concerned that a segment of the population may find that five minute video-watching and connection process problematic.” He’ll only know once it launches, he said.
Even more than the daunting setup, truthfully, is the size and shape. Everyone I showed the Autoblow AI+ to had the same concern: How am I supposed to hold that thing upside down on my dick long enough to come? The device weighs almost three pounds, which probably sounds light until you’re balancing it on your erect penis. The answer to this, according to Sloan, is a forthcoming neck strap that will wrap around the Autoblow to support it. “You’d be amazed at how complex it can be to design something that sounds so simple,” Sloan said.
Before asking how that will work in practice, please remember that this is the same man who conceptualized the masturbation machine you use while behind the wheel of a car using a cupholder for support.
The Autoblow AI+ is available for purchase on Autoblow’s website as of Wednesday morning, and retails for $249.95.
