Your robot vacuum can already clean your floors. Now one American company wants it to actually listen to you.
Matic Robots, a startup based in Mountain View, California, just added a feature that lets you control its vacuum by speaking out loud. No phone. No app. No fiddling with buttons. Just point at a mess and say "clean this."
It is a direct challenge to cheaper Chinese rivals that have been flooding the market. And it comes at a moment when the US government is quietly making life harder for those foreign competitors.
The new feature is called Matic Cues, and it goes live with a software update on Thursday. The vacuum already had five built-in cameras and microphones installed, but they were sitting unused. This update wakes them up.
You can say "Hey Matic" to get its attention, then tell it to clean a specific spill or follow you around the house. It understands more than 70 languages. The robot keeps its obstacle avoidance system on even in voice-only mode, so it will not plow through your dog's water bowl just because you asked it to clean the kitchen.
Matic's co-founder and president, Mehul Nariyawala, says this is the moment the company has been working toward since day one. "It's good to finally ship what we dreamed about almost nine years ago," he said.
The voice commands run directly on the device, so the robot is not constantly sending audio of your home to the cloud. If you turn off Matic Cues in the app, the microphones switch off completely.
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That privacy angle matters, because rivals like Roborock, Dreame, and Anker usually need Amazon Alexa or Google Home to process voice commands.
Matic is one of the few American robot vacuum makers still standing. Roomba creator iRobot filed for bankruptcy late last year. That leaves Matic in a lonely spot, competing against Chinese brands that are often cheaper and get heavy promotion on Amazon and in big-box stores.
The company is not backing down. Nariyawala recently called out Anker online for using the word "Matic" in an Amazon product description.
In late July, the FCC added foreign-made advanced robots to its Covered List, which makes it harder for Roborock and others to launch new US models.
Matic buys components from abroad but designs and assembles its robots in the US. Nariyawala says the company had productive talks with the FCC and expects no problems.
The robot costs $1,245 right now, but that price jumps to $1,495 starting in early September. Nariyawala says higher memory and component prices are behind the increase. The current model has been on sale for two years, and the company has sold more than 13,000 units.
After a $60 million round in January, Matic's total funding stands at $115 million. Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison, Jack Dorsey, and two people now working on AI at Meta are among the backers. The company was started by two former Google Nest engineers, Nariyawala and Navneet Dalal.
Nariyawala says about one-third of the originally planned features have not shipped yet. He expects the remaining cleaning features to arrive in the next six to nine months. After that, the company might add security alerts, though that would mean relying more on the cloud.
The bigger vision is a future robot with more intelligence and processing power. Nariyawala sees it as a trusted home organizer, not just a floor cleaner.
"When we started, we wrote down on a piece of paper that we're never going to get acquired," he said. "How would they trust a full-blown humanoid in that scenario? So, the first thing is let's earn the trust by showing people that you can really rely on this robot."
For your money, the takeaway is simple. The robot vacuum market is getting more interesting as US and Chinese companies fight for your kitchen floor. That competition usually means better features and lower prices. Just know that the American option with the fancy voice controls will cost you more, and the price is going up soon.
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