Matic Robots Inc, a US-based robot vacuum maker, is upgrading its consumer model with advanced voice commands that will allow the product to clean messes or entire rooms without the user having to initiate the process from a smartphone.
The vacuum, which first shipped two years ago, has always included built-in microphones, co-founder and President Mehul Nariyawala said in an interview, but they were dormant and inactive until now. Starting with a firmware update rolling out on Aug 13, the vacuum will respond to a "Hey Matic” greeting and be able to identify and clean areas using its five integrated cameras. Users will be able to say "clean this” while pointing to a mess, and the robot will understand.
The new feature, called Matic Cues, supports over 70 languages and will also allow the robot vacuum to follow a user through the home on command. Users can also make requests like "come here.” As it does in normal cleaning modes, the Matic automatically avoids obstacles when programmed to the all-voice setting.
Matic is one of a few remaining robot vacuum brands operating out of the US. IRobot Corp, the company that pioneered robot vacuum cleaners in the early 2000s with its Roomba line, filed for bankruptcy late last year. Chinese brands like Roborock, Dreame and Anker are often priced significantly lower and heavily promoted on Amazon and at big-box retail stores. Nariyawala recently chided Anker on social media for including the word "Matic” in one of its Amazon product descriptions.
But those Chinese manufacturers were dealt a significant blow in late July when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) updated its so-called Covered List to include foreign-produced advanced robotic devices, which could make it difficult for Roborock and other brands to bring new models to the US. Devices already on the market can continue to be imported. Matic sources many parts from foreign suppliers, but design and assembly are handled in the US. Nariyawala said conversations with the FCC have been productive and he doesn’t foresee any problems for future Matic hardware.
Mountain View, California-based Matic is positioning this hands-free cleaning functionality as a standout differentiator. A Matic vacuum currently costs US$1,245 (RM5,087), but last month, the company announced that the price will climb to US$1,495 (RM6,108) in early September. It attributed the pending hike to the rising cost of memory and other components. So far, it has sold over 13,000 units and the devices have collectively cleaned nearly 400 million square feet, Nariyawala said. On average, customers use the robot around seven times each week, he added.
Matic was founded by Nariyawala and Navneet Dalal, who both formerly worked as engineers at Google’s Nest division. In January, the company announced US$60mil (RM245.22mi) in new financing, bringing the total funding haul to US$115mil (RM470mil). Its investors include Stripe LLC co-founders Patrick Collison and John Collison, and Block Inc co-founder Jack Dorsey, as well as Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, who are both now involved in Meta Platforms Inc’s AI efforts.
"When we started, we wrote down on a piece of paper that we’re never going to get acquired,” Nariyawala said. "It's good to finally ship what we dreamed about almost nine years ago,” he added, referring to the now voice-enabled robot vacuum.
Matic Cues are processed on the device and "nothing is going to the cloud in terms of ambient sounds,” the company said in a blog post on Aug 13. But a cloud-based Google Gemini application programming interface, or API, is used to parse voice commands and to enable the comprehensive language support. "Once we get an understanding of the top commands used, we will distil a smaller on-device model for those who do not want to use Gemini API,” the company said.
If a user disables the Matic Cues feature in the mobile app’s settings, the vacuum’s microphones will be turned off, just as they were previously.
Robot vacuums from other brands have supported voice controls through smart home platforms like Amazon Alexa and Google Home, but Matic’s solution is unique in that it’s being built directly into the robot itself. Nariyawala said there’s still more that the company wants to get out of this first-generation device. Matic has established a frequent pace of firmware updates that have steadily improved the robot’s cleaning prowess and understanding of the world around it.
Competitors introduce new vacuum models on a continual basis, but Matic still has more it wants to accomplish with its first device. Reflecting on the company’s list of originally planned features, Nariyawala said there’s still another third left to go. Once the robot has perfected those remaining cleaning features – he estimates this will happen within six to nine months – it could eventually add other capabilities like home security alerts.
"That’s when the sentry mode gets very interesting,” he said, admitting such a feature would necessitate greater reliance on the cloud.
Matic wants its next robot to serve as "a trusted organiser” with greater intelligence and more advanced processing than the vacuum. In the meantime, the company is working to gain greater consumer trust by making its first product smarter and more versatile in the home.
Most customers "can’t trust the robot vacuums to do a job,” Nariyawala 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, and then maybe there is a second one and third one and at some point when you have three or four robots doing various tasks and you come up with a three-in-one, people will say, ‘I get it. I’m going to buy that.’” – Bloomberg
