This is the moment we’ve been waiting for since 2017. From the day we started Matic, we have always known that the best way to interact with a robot is the same way you interact with another person.
9 years ago, a very different ‘robot’ sat on our office floor. It was loud, ugly, and held together with more duct tape than we'd care to admit. Mehul pointed at a spot on the carpet and said, clean this.
It worked.
But knowing something can work is not the same as being ready to put it in someone's home. So we got to work.
Today we are launching Matic Cues. Matic is now the first robot in history to understand over 70 different languages and instinctive human gestures older than them all.
Robots should learn the human way, not the other way around
People have instinctively used cues to communicate for over 200,000 years, long before we even had languages. A point, a wave, a knowing look.
But then we built apps that became these fancy but absolutely non-intuitive ways to interface with technology. There’s one app to call a cab, another to order your groceries and yet another to control the thermostat. That’s grabbing your phone, opening an app and learning a new interface for every single thing you want to do. Why did we just accept that using ‘smart’ technology meant us learning its language and not the other way around?
Cleaning robots are no different. It’s the same routine of pulling out your phone, opening an app and using it to let the robot know what needs cleaning. We also built one of these apps, but that was never our final answer.
It’s much simpler than research
Academia has spent decades studying human-robot interaction. They’ve even made a whole discipline out of it.
Our answer has always been far simpler. Just interact with the robot like you would with anyone else. This is the goal we’ve been chasing since 2017.
A genuinely intelligent robot that is intuitive to use should adapt to how people already communicate with each other, without needing us to learn a whole new interface just to use it. We'd seen this was possible that day on the office floor.
Today we have Matic Cues
Now, you can talk to Matic like you normally would, in any of the 70+ languages it understands. Just say Hey Matic, clean the kitchen, follow me or go to the living room. Don’t be afraid to get super specific and tell Matic exactly what you want. Say Hey Matic, clean the edges of the rug in the living room and watch the magic.
You can simply point to a mess and say, Hey Matic, clean this and see Matic understand exactly what to clean. It can do this because it sees your hand and what you're pointing at. A robot using lidar to navigate can map a room, but it sees nothing, so it can’t recognize anything.
The first time someone says Hey Matic and the robot turns to look at them, just like a person does, their reaction is always the same: pure delight.
But why does any of this matter?
We've always built Matic for families, but families go beyond tech-savvy adults. They include kids, grandparents with no interest in learning a new app, people who'd rather speak Spanish, French, or Farsi, and moms whose hands are full: the people who need Matic most. If they can't use it, what's the point of building it? So we made sure they could. No learning curve. No one left out.
Everyone in the house can put Matic to work, so everyone can welcome the mess, because life does not happen despite the messy moments. It happens right in the middle of them.
The afternoon when you’ve got the kids so your partner can sleep off a fever, because Matic’s got the floors. The birthday party you enjoy without thinking twice about the sprinkles on the rug. Popcorn from movie night. Muddy paw prints by the door. Let it all happen, because the mess isn't yours to clean. Matic takes care of it, while you stay right where you belong: in the moment that becomes the memory.
Time is the one thing none of us can buy back.
That’s why we built Matic Cues.
Privacy
"Hey Matic" is all on device so nothing is going to cloud in terms of ambient sounds. The gestures are all detected on the device as well. No camera data leaves your robot. Once you say, Hey Matic, and you hear a chime, you can give a command. This command uses Gemini API to parse it anonymously. No user info is sent. If you don't want to use Matic Cues. You can turn it off in the settings. And microphones turn off.
We chose to do it this way because it enables 70+ languages and many commands. Once we get an understanding of the top commands used, we will distill a smaller on-device model for those who do not want to use Gemini API.