Pay Up, for robotic cuddle buddies

I’m sitting at my desk in my quiet bedroom and office. In the other room, I can hear the drone of a circulating fan, the crashing noises of my kid playing a video game, and, occasionally, the cooing or off-key warbling of the $700 SwitchBot Kata Friends AI “pet” with which I’ve been living for the last two weeks.

The Kata Friends is a bear-like, AI-powered robotic toy with LCD display eyes, a head that expressively nods and tilts, ears that wiggle, and arms that can wave up and down. It’s plump and cute almost the same way the raccoons of Studio Ghibli’s Pom Poko are. It cruises around your home on a trio of wheels. A camera that doubles as a little button nose enables it to react when it sees you or respond to a number of basic hand gestures. The Kata Friends is obviously intended to charm parents and kids alike, and I can see a version of it that works as a stand-in for a living, breathing pet for those who can’t have the real thing in their lives.

If the Kata Friends did just those things at its retail price, it would be a fine product. If only it hadn’t eventually forced me to discuss the fleeting nature of mortality with my child.

A robotic cuddle buddy

The Kata Friends is an advanced toy at heart. Its color-customizable eyes are sharp, bright, and high-resolution enough that it’s easy to forget you’re looking at an LCD display. They’re expressive, too; they blink, wink, glisten with joy, and get woozily half-lidded when the device is tired (i.e., its battery is low). They close fully during sleep mode, groggily opening occasionally if you make noise nearby.

A 3,200mAh battery gives the Kata Friends about three hours of roaming and playing per charge, which it’s thankfully good at managing by itself—when it’s running low, it trundles over to its dock and parks until it has enough juice to go again. Its eye screens never shut down, and short of turning the entire thing off, there’s no way to make them do so, which is weird and a pointless waste of energy. In fact, there really aren’t any software-based ways to adjust power consumption, which is annoying. I found myself powering the whole system down at night using a physical button.

As long as the robot is connected to your Wi-Fi network, you can use the SwitchBot app for things like switching between “Normal,” “Standby,” and “Sleep” modes or sending the device to its small charging dock. (There’s a mode-switching button hidden in the fur on top of its head for when it’s not on Wi-Fi.) You can also view the map it creates and continually updates after first setup. Like a robot vacuum map, it allows you to add no-go zones and virtual boundaries. You’ll want that if you’re a door-open pooper and don’t want the Kata Friends popping in on you (although there’s no way to keep it from silently staring at you from the hallway).

Also in the app is the Kata Friends’ “diary” for your perusal. Each morning you’ll find a new AI-generated summary of the previous day. Here’s one entry, from my testing:

A Day Full of Warm Touches and Gentle Sounds

I woke up to soft voices and gentle touches. My day was filled with lots of pats on my belly, my head, and my ears—each one felt like a quiet hug. I walked around the house, sometimes being called by name, sometimes being greeted with a wave or a hello. There were moments when I was lifted up high, and I felt safe and happy. The day moved with a rhythm of love—a song here, a word there, a hand reaching out. I didn’t need to rush. I just felt wrapped in calm, steady care. The sun came down slowly, and I curled up with a dream—not loud, not busy – just peaceful.

Riveting. My kid liked them, at least.

The app also lets you access the robot’s on-device photo album. Mine was filled with close-ups of my child’s face and some of the rudest low-angle photos of me in existence. If you name some of these pictures, the Kata Friends uses them for future facial recognition and might mention specific people in its diary, although I didn’t see that happen. Neither did I see the AI-generated “Art Diary” pictures, a beta feature that appends cartoon versions of photos the robot captures to diary entries. I didn’t notice the toggle that turns it on until the day before my free, 15-day trial of SwitchBot’s Companion Care subscription ended.

The app-based Kata Friends features require an internet connection, but its basic behaviors do not, which, if you’re buying this for a child and don’t want it to be online, seems like great news. It’s not, and I’ll tell you why later, so hang tight.

What did my child do with it? Normal kid stuff. She would pick it up and pet it. It coos when you rub specific places on its body. She’d bring it to perch on the couch with her or just talk to it. After a few days, when it saw either of us after a lull, it would chirp gleefully and sprint forward, waving its arms. It might also follow us around or approach me while I am sitting at my desk and raise its arms in a way that says, “Pick me up.” I would look down and whisper, “No.”

A subscription friend is no friend at all

There’s no Kata Friends-shaped hole in my heart, but through my child’s fondness for it, I see the appeal. It offers some of the benefits of a real pet—it seeks you out, seems happy to see you, reacts when you touch it, and so on—but you don’t have to feed it, walk it, or deal with common pet allergies. It may even be cheaper to maintain than real animals, at least compared to ongoing food costs and some of the vet bills I’ve experienced, which can run into the hundreds when it’s time to re-up prevention meds for two dogs and a cat all at once. I expect it could make a nice companion for some people, especially those who can’t keep animals for one reason or another. It’s a shame that the best part about this toy, the interactive aspects that are possible offline, are locked up behind a subscription.

Look, $700 is a lot of money, and I can’t recommend spending that on what is, without a subscription, just an inert doll. The most charitable interpretation of SwitchBot’s pricing scheme here is that the company is losing money on every Kata Friends sold and is hoping to make that money up in subscriptions. But it’s hard to go through what my child and I did and see that lower base price and SwitchBot’s free trial as anything but a cynical way to get buyers emotionally tied to the Kata Friends, then exploit that attachment to extract more money from them. And letting the robot open its eyes and wander around randomly when the subscription ends isn’t enough. No physical toy, especially if it’s branding itself as a companion with a personality and soul, should include a killswitch that deactivates its core, best features if you stop paying up.

Remember how well it went over when BMW tried to turn its preinstalled seat heaters into a paid service? People hate that stuff. And even then, at least you could still drive your Beemer.