Nothing makes me feel warmer and fuzzier inside than a furry AI companion with an LLM running on-device.
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) do, but here’s some jargon from SwitchBot to help kind of clarify things. SwitchBot says they’re “private, low-latency, and always-on companionship with on-device LLM.
