There’s no polite way to tell someone their feet or breath stink, leaving society with one clear choice: hand the job to a cold, remorseless robot. The Asahi Shimbun reports that researchers in Fukuoka, Japan have created a pair of robots — a girl and a dog — whose odor sensors can determine just how bad you smell.

The female robot, named Kaori (a play on the Japanese word for "aroma"), samples your breath through an opening in her mouth. After mulling things over for a few seconds (video), the brown-haired, blue-eyed breath taster returns one of four ratings, from the head-scratching "sweet and sour, smells good!" to "we have an emergency." The dog, named Shuntaro, responds to how your feet smell non-verbally, either by cozying up to them if they smell alright, or, if not, growling or fainting.

The pair was the idea of Kennosuke Tsutsumi, president of robot maker CrazyLabo, and developed in collaboration with the Kitakyushu National College of Technology. But the project couldn’t have been completed without the help of ten male students, whose consumption of foul-smelling foods like garlic and natto (fermented soybeans) and multi-day unwashed socks were used to calibrate the robots.