{"id":126013,"date":"2025-09-07T06:48:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-07T06:48:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/126013\/"},"modified":"2025-09-07T06:48:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-07T06:48:06","slug":"is-local-ai-the-unexpected-fix-to-the-obsolescence-of-robot-vacuums","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/126013\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Local AI the Unexpected Fix to the Obsolescence of Robot Vacuums?"},"content":{"rendered":"

During a presentation at IFA 2025<\/a>, Deebot parent company Ecovacs (full disclosure: travel and lodging were paid by Ecovacs, but Gizmodo did not guarantee any coverage as a condition of accepting the trip) said repeatedly that its new X11 OmniCyclone robot vacuum<\/a>\u2018s AI smarts are all on-device. Or the bulk of them are, anyway. I returned to the booth later and spoke with a couple of the company\u2019s representatives to try to figure out exactly how divorced from the cloud the Deebot X11 OmniCyclone truly is\u2014is it an all-on-device experience, like the Matic robot vacuum, or does it still need an internet connection to keep its best functionality?<\/p>\n

The Deebot X11 OmniCyclone\u2019s promise is that it can use local AI smarts to do things like identify spills and messes on the floor and decide how best to clean them, and if mopping is required, what kind of mopping solution to use (the X11\u2019s charging dock holds a couple of options). It can also learn from your routine, shifting and morphing its cleaning schedule and approach over time to suit your behavior.<\/p>\n

\"Ecovacs\u00a9 Wes Davis \/ Gizmodo <\/p>\n

You, the owner, can talk to the AI Agent Yiko\u2014the company\u2019s name for its refreshed, generative AI-powered vacuum assistant\u2014and give it some pretty broad, natural-language requests, at least according to Ecovacs. I didn\u2019t get to test this out. I wanted to know how broad. Can you say, \u201cHey Yiko, only clean the bedroom on Fridays,\u201d and it works? Ecovacs\u2019s folks said yes. What about, \u201cHey Yiko, please clean up around my dining room table at 7 p.m. every night.\u201d Yep, that\u2019s apparently possible, too, although the rep told me you might need to name that table in the Ecovacs Home app and call it by that specific name when you speak your request. Again, I didn\u2019t get to test any of this.<\/p>\n

Not that it would matter if your internet went down\u2014in that case, you\u2019d lose a lot of functionality, according to the reps. The app would no longer work because it bounces through Ecovacs\u2019 cloud infrastructure in the U.S. to do that. No more tapping around to tell the robot to clean specific rooms, or remotely controlling it from your smartphone, or seeing cloud-saved videos recorded while you were doing that. It also means no Yiko, because the device\u2019s generative AI voice assistant is cloud-dependent, too.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a way to use the robot vacuum in which that doesn\u2019t matter. There\u2019s an \u201cAgent Hosting\u201d mode in the Ecovacs Home app where you can switch the Deebot X11 OmniCyclone to AI-only control, essentially putting all of your faith in it to clean your house properly. It might be able to do so, at least according to Ecovacs, which says it can recognize over 100 different categories of objects, as small as a grain of sand. If you switch it to that mode and find that it does just fine at cleaning your house, with no input from you, then you may never bother with the app again. And if that\u2019s\u00a0the case, you might never know when your internet is out or that the Deebot X11 OmniCyclone has lost its connection to your network.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean the robot would be useless. Ecovacs\u2019s reps told me that without an internet connection, the Deebot X11 OmniCyclone\u2019s onboard AI would still do its thing, sliding its schedule around as needed, identifying messes, and switching up its cleaning approach as it goes along. I asked if the company sees a future where even the AI voice assistant is on-device, and the reps weren\u2019t sure.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not all the way to the world I want to see, where my smart home devices never need an internet connection to bring me their full feature set, or close enough to it for blues. But it is an encouraging move in that direction, assuming it all works the way Ecovacs says it will. And, with AI, that can be a big \u201cif.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"During a presentation at IFA 2025, Deebot parent company Ecovacs (full disclosure: travel and lodging were paid by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":126014,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,67230,1800,66522,38416,22911,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-126013","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-ecovacs","14":"tag-hands-on","15":"tag-ifa-2025","16":"tag-robot-vacuums","17":"tag-robots","18":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126013","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=126013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126013\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/126014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}