Lots of people had stuffed animals when they were little. My personal favorite was a teddy bear in army fatigues, named—you guessed it—Army Bear. Fidel Castro was already taken, unfortunately. As much as I loved Army Bear, I remember thinking, “This would be so much more adorable with an on-device LLM designed to understand cloud-free natural language prompts and enable object recognition via computer vision.” And finally, almost 30 years later, SwitchBot has answered my very real and not-at-all-fabricated-for-the-sake-of-sarcasm prayers!

Introducing, Kata friends, a robotic companion out of IFA 2025 made by a company called SwitchBot. It’s as fluffy as it is confusing and stuffed with AI. Let me be clear, I am nowhere near concrete on what these little guys (named Noa and Niko) d

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