Lots of people had stuffed animals when they were little. My personal favorite was a teddy bear in army fatigues, named—you guessed it—Army Bear. Fidel Castro was already taken, unfortunately. As much as I loved Army Bear, I remember thinking, “This would be so much more adorable with an on-device LLM designed to understand cloud-free natural language prompts and enable object recognition via computer vision.” And finally, almost 30 years later, SwitchBot has answered my very real and not-at-all-fabricated-for-the-sake-of-sarcasm prayers!
Introducing, Kata friends, a robotic companion out of IFA 2025 made by a company called SwitchBot, that’s as fluffy as it is confusing and stuffed with AI. Let me be clear, I am nowhere near concrete on what these little guys (named Noa and Niko) do, but here’s some jargon from SwitchBot to help kind of clarify things. SwitchBot says they’re “private, low-latency, and always-on companionship with on-device LLM. Designed to be forever by your side.”
Nice! I guess? From what I can gather, these furry little AI meatballs are designed for companionship mostly and can do some stuff that you’d assume a furry AI companion would do, like… Oh god, it gets jealous?! Why?! Why would it get jealous?! Again, per SwitchBot (emphasis mine):
“It recognizes family members, responds to gestures and emotions, and shows feelings such as happiness, sadness, or jealousy. Over time, it learns routines and memories, becoming an engaging, evolving household presence.”
So, just to get this straight, my AI companion, loaded with an LLM (the same tech that Sam Altman says is going to change the world, or revolutionize work, or whatever he’s saying nowadays), is programmed to experience jealousy, learn my routines, and remember stuff about me by constantly watching what I do? I don’t know about you, but that sounds… awesome. Hell yeah, sign me up. No notes! Army Bear was an idiot. I hate him now.
I jest, obviously. Because even if these little robots could, I don’t know, blackmail me out of jealousy because I showed affection to a flesh-and-blood member of my family, they wouldn’t be able to do anything weird like try and trip me while walking down the stairs since they can’t even mov—oh, Jesus AI Christ, they can move. According to SwitchBot, they have small wheels that allow them to scoot around independently, which is to say, wherever their tiny, conniving wheels will take them. Sigh.
I mean, whatever. This is just IFA vaporware; this thing (which doesn’t have a price or release date yet) probably won’t even get made. So, we can all rest easy knowing that SwitchBot’s cute AI murderbot won’t ever see the light of day—just kidding. SwitchBot actually has a track record of bringing some of its wild robot inventions to life, which at this point is fine, because at least we all get to stop wondering what AI is going to do and just run from something. And you know what? Bring it on, SwitchBot. I’m done waiting around. Let’s get this cute AI cataclysm show on the road.
Read the full article here
