SwitchBot's New AI Pets Respond to Your Behavior, Won't Pee on the Carpet
Key takeaways
- The latest example: Switch Bot, an AI-enabled home robotics systems provider, on Tuesday announced the launch of Kata Friends: two AI pets, Noa and Niko, with distinct personalities that will evolve over time.
- "Kata Friends is 'pet first', meaning it gradually learns and grows with you.
- Underneath their plush coats, the gentle, shy gray-furred Niko and the energetic, white-furred Noa have some serious hardware.
If you've been holding off on adopting a pet because you don't want to clean up after them or concern yourself with pricey vet visits, the world of AI robot pots is expanding to cater to you and others with similar hesitancies. The latest example: Switch Bot, an AI-enabled home robotics systems provider, on Tuesday announced the launch of Kata Friends: two AI pets, Noa and Niko, with distinct personalities that will evolve over time.
"Kata Friends is 'pet first', meaning it gradually learns and grows with you. It is not a cold machine; it's a presence that feels alive," says the company's "parenting guide." It describes Kata Friends as the world's first on-device AI pet robot that grows with you and changes based on how it's "raised."
Underneath their plush coats, the gentle, shy gray-furred Niko and the energetic, white-furred Noa have some serious hardware. Most notably, they were built with an on-device LLM -- an AI large language model -- allowing them to interact with you and respond anywhere, even without Wi-Fi.