Matic’s Robot Vacuum Will See (and Hear) You Now

I haven’t been particularly quiet about how much I like the unusually boxy, upright Matic robot vacuum since reviewing it last year . Even if it can’t get under my couch, it’s so smartly designed and so effective everywhere else that it has become the yardstick by which I judge all other floor-cleaning automatons. Now, after many months of steadily ticking smaller feature checkboxes, Matic has rolled out a big update that brings voice and gesture control.

Together, the new input methods are called “Matic Cues.” Starting today, Aug. 13, owners with the new firmware will be able to use the wake phrase “Hey Matic” and issue natural language commands to the robot, which are then processed in cloud servers by Google Gemini. These can be as simple as “start cleaning” to initiate a whole-home cleaning job or as complex as “vacuum the dining room rug and then mop the hard flooring in the bedroom.” You can also ask the robot to follow you or say something like “clean this” while pointing at a spot on the floor to have it do a quick spot clean.

I’ve been testing the features out for a few days. When you say its wake phrase, it will turn to face you as its screen lights up with a blue background and the word “Listening…” The only feature that I thought still needed work was having the robot follow me—it was easy for it to lose track of me if I rounded a corner or walked by a chair. (It had a tendency to shift focus to the chair legs instead of my human ones.)

Everything else worked well, though. In one test, I dumped some cornmeal on the ground in my kitchen and some scraps of paper on my living room rug before pointing to each spot to ask it to clean them. (I quickly realized that the Matic was just spot cleaning, not recognizing the mess I pointed at and cleaning that.) It responded by either backing up to get a better look at me or telling me, using text on its display, to step back for the same reason if it didn’t have room to reverse, then cleaning up the spot I’d pointed out.

The Matic also successfully carried out complex requests—the example from the above paragraph was one I used the morning before I started writing this story. It was nice to be able to quickly ask the robot to vacuum in one room and mop in the other as a single job. Matic’s app doesn’t let you set cleaning preferences on a per-room basis, making the voice command the first time that’s been part of the robot’s feature set.

I asked Matic co-founder Mehul Nariyawala in an interview this week if users will be able to do that in the app. He responded that the company hasn’t before now because it doesn’t want to overcomplicate the app. “The answer is yes, we absolutely want to do this, but from here onwards, we want to approach everything voice-first.” (Other robot vacuums I’ve reviewed, like the Eufy Omni E28 and the Narwal Freo Z10 Turbo , let you set per-room cleaning preferences in their associated apps, but I wouldn’t call any of their implementations graceful.)

Overall, it’s a nice update that Matic owners may appreciate, especially since it lets others in the home operate it without having to deal with an app.