By: Nick Gambino
1X Technologies is now accepting preorders for their robotic housekeeper that they’re calling NEO Home Robot.
“Humanoids were long a thing of sci-fi…then they were a thing of research, but today – with the launch of NEO – humanoid robots become a product,” the CEO and Founder of IX, Bernt Bornich, said in a blog post announcing the robot butler. “NEO closes the gap between our imaginations and the world we live in, to the point where we can actually ask a humanoid robot for help, and help is granted.”
The company unveiled the automaton last year and promised to create safe and intelligent humanoids. We’ll start with “safe” and get to “intelligent” later.
1X designed NEO’s body to be soft and have no pinch-points. With the clumsy robot stumbling around, you don’t want to get hurt. It’s also splash-proof. But while it might be physically safe, there is one not-so-fine print in your privacy contract with the company.
You see, the walking, talking machine supposedly can take care of household chores like moving boxes, vacuuming, watering plants, pretty much anything you might not want to do yourself. It’ll only cost you $20,000 and a huge slice of your privacy.
If NEO runs into something he/she/it can’t figure out, a real-live human employee of IX throws on a VR headset and accesses the robot, controlling it remotely with full view of the space through its eyes.
This is something users will have to agree to and apparently it’s essential to NEO’s learning. When a human is remotely controlling it, the emotive ear rings on the side of its head light up. You can opt out of these sessions if you want.
NEO The Home Robot
Order Today pic.twitter.com/fTQtCHB4UW— 1X (@1x_tech) October 28, 2025
Now the ad shows NEO performing a lot of tasks that it might not be able to do in real life. Chalk it up to false advertising or the promise of what’s to come. The idea behind putting these robots in your home now is that it allows the on-board AI to learn how to do different things.
I guess the argument is it needs on-the-job training in the space it’s going to be working in. In an ideal world (though I don’t know if having a robot in your household is ideal) it will get better and better, “growing” and learning. Kind of like a new employee…a new employee that has less hand-eye coordination than a four-year-old.
And the thing is the onus on training or raising these robots is on early adopters. And because they’re only going to start rolling out in 2026 publicly, it’s not clear how well the AI has been trained on different types of households and chores. Let’s just say they’re not quite ready to compete at the Robot Olympics in China yet.
There are videos that show it struggling. Like the one where NEO tries to place three simple things in a dishwasher. The task takes five minutes and is barely completed. We’ll have to see how NEO does over the next couple years and whether we’re at the precipice of Jetsons generation.
