{"id":121338,"date":"2025-09-05T07:39:05","date_gmt":"2025-09-05T07:39:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/121338\/"},"modified":"2025-09-05T07:39:05","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T07:39:05","slug":"finally-you-can-cuddle-with-a-cute-camera-clad-ai-robot-that-feels-jealousy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/121338\/","title":{"rendered":"Finally, You Can Cuddle With a Cute Camera-Clad AI Robot That Feels Jealousy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Lots of people had stuffed animals when they were little. My personal favorite was a teddy bear in army fatigues, named\u2014you guessed it\u2014Army Bear. Fidel Castro was already taken, unfortunately. As much as I loved Army Bear, I remember thinking, \u201cThis 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.\u201d And finally, almost 30 years later, <a href=\"https:\/\/us.switch-bot.com\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">SwitchBot<\/a> has answered my very real and not-at-all-fabricated-for-the-sake-of-sarcasm prayers!<\/p>\n<p>Introducing, <a href=\"https:\/\/us.switch-bot.com\/pages\/events\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Kata friends,<\/a> a robotic companion out of <a href=\"https:\/\/gizmodo.com\/live-updates-from-ifa-2025-in-berlin-%F0%9F%94%B4-2000649907\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">IFA 2025<\/a> made by a company called SwitchBot. It\u2019s 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\u2019s some jargon from SwitchBot to help kind of clarify things. SwitchBot says they\u2019re \u201cprivate, low-latency, and always-on companionship with on-device <a href=\"https:\/\/gizmodo.com\/openais-gpt-5-has-clearly-never-seen-the-sopranos-2000641447\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">LLM<\/a>. Designed to be forever by your side.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019d assume a furry AI companion would do, like\u2026 Oh god, it gets jealous?! Why?! Why would it get jealous?! Again, per SwitchBot (emphasis mine):<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<p> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-2000654059\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/switchbot.jpg\" alt=\"SwitchBot AI companion.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\"  \/>I\u2019d be jealous, too, if I found out my brethren got to wear cool Halloween stuff year-round. \u00a9 SwitchBot <\/p>\n<p>So, just to get this straight, my AI companion, loaded with an LLM (the same tech that <a href=\"https:\/\/gizmodo.com\/sam-altmans-lies-about-chatgpt-are-growing-bolder-2000614431\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Sam Altman<\/a> says is going to change the world, or revolutionize work, or <a href=\"https:\/\/gizmodo.com\/as-people-ridicule-gpt-5-sam-altman-says-openai-will-need-trillions-in-infrastructure-2000643867\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">whatever he\u2019s saying nowadays<\/a>), is programmed to experience jealousy,\u00a0learn my routines, and remember stuff about me by constantly watching what I do? I don\u2019t know about you, but that sounds\u2026 awesome. Hell yeah, sign me up. No notes! Army Bear was an idiot. I hate him now.<\/p>\n<p>I jest, obviously. Because even if these little robots could, I don\u2019t know, blackmail me out of jealousy because I showed affection to a flesh-and-blood member of my family, they wouldn\u2019t be able to do anything weird like try and trip me while walking down the stairs since they can\u2019t even mov\u2014oh, 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.<\/p>\n<p> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-2000654089\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/switchbot-catbot-1.jpg\" alt=\"Switchbot Kata friend robot\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\"  \/>\u00a9 Kyle Barr \/ Gizmodo <\/p>\n<p>I mean, whatever. This is just IFA vaporware; this thing (which doesn\u2019t have a price or release date yet) probably won\u2019t even get made. So, we can all rest easy knowing that SwitchBot\u2019s cute AI murderbot won\u2019t ever see the light of day\u2014just 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\u2019m done waiting around. Let\u2019s get this cute <a href=\"https:\/\/gizmodo.com\/bernie-sanders-reveals-the-ai-doomsday-scenario-that-worries-top-experts-2000628611\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">AI cataclysm<\/a> show on the road.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lots of people had stuffed animals when they were little. My personal favorite was a teddy bear in&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":121339,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,66522,22911,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-121338","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-ifa-2025","14":"tag-robots","15":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121338\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/121339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}