NEO: The Humanoid Home Robot That Folds Your Laundry and Serves Coffee – Future of Everyday Life or an Expensive Experiment?

Meet NEO, a household robot from 1X Technologies that climbs stairs, tidies your space, and learns your daily routine. Is this the first real step toward living with AI companions we've seen only in sci-fi?

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Introduction

For years, people have dreamed about having an autonomous robot that could take care of household chores. The idea of a humanoid helper who folds laundry, washes dishes, and brings you coffee used to sound like something reserved for movies like Ex Machina or I, Robot.

Yet that idea now has a name, stands 167 centimeters tall, weighs 30 kilograms, and wears a soft, washable home suit. The robot’s name is NEO, and it comes from the Palo Alto-based company 1X Technologies.

Created right in the heart of the startup ecosystem, where ideas either reshape the world or fade as quirky footnotes in tech history, the question now is: Which path will NEO take?

How the NEO Home Assistant Was Designed

NEO is designed as a domestic helper that performs everyday household chores, freeing people from routine tasks and giving them back their most valuable resource: time. The team at 1X says NEO’s mission is simple: take over time-consuming activities such as folding clothes, tidying countertops, brewing coffee, organizing rooms, and opening doors.

NEO isn’t meant to be a gadget.

It is intended to become a new member of the household, think of a digital home assistant, but with arms, legs, vision, hearing, and the ability to physically interact with your environment.

What sets NEO apart in the growing race to build humanoid robots is its Tendon Drive system. This mechanism mimics human tendon function, allowing movements that are precise, fluid, and, importantly, safe around people.

NEO’s arms have 22 degrees of freedom, meaning it can grasp and manipulate objects with surprisingly fine control. It can climb stairs, navigate obstacles, and operate autonomously during most domestic tasks.

According to 1X, in theory, NEO can load delicate glassware into a dishwasher as carefully as a human. In theory, that is. Practice, however, is where things get interesting.

Source: Google.com

Challenges in NEO’s Early Version

The Wall Street Journal got access to an early version of NEO. While the robot did manage to place glasses into the dishwasher, the process was slow, cautious, and guided by a remote human operator supervising the task.

This isn’t surprising. Humanoid manipulation technology is extremely complex, and NEO is still learning. Early adopters will have to accept that the robot won’t be fully autonomous at first. 1X openly states that during the initial months, NEO will operate with remote teleoperator assistance, meaning someone from the company can see through NEO’s cameras during tasks and guide it when needed.

Once NEO fully learns the assigned household routines, the need for teleoperation should fade away, and the robot will continue improving through software updates.

Not exactly “perfect privacy while the robot cleans your toilet or folds your partner’s underwear,” but at least 1X is honest about how the system works.

Privacy Inside Your Home

Privacy is one of the biggest concerns when it comes to robots entering our personal spaces. 1X emphasizes that users can define “no-vision zones,” that people appearing in the camera view can be automatically blurred, and that all collected data is used strictly for improving NEO’s performance.

Users can control how much the robot sees and transmits. Still, if you’re someone who gets anxious about cameras, AI, and cloud data, NEO might not be your ideal companion. At least, not yet.

Strength, Power, and Communication

Now that we’ve covered how NEO thinks and learns, it’s worth mentioning that NEO is actually quite strong. It can lift up to 70 kilograms and comfortably carry around 25 kilograms, which makes it useful beyond just tidying up.

NEO has four microphones for hearing, three speakers for communication, and two 8MP cameras for vision, allowing it to understand and react to its surroundings in real time. It operates at just 22 dB of noise, quieter than a typical refrigerator.

The robot runs for up to four hours on a single charge, and when the battery gets low, it automatically returns to its charger, like someone who knows exactly where their bed is and doesn’t need to make a big deal about it.

There’s a somewhat legendary story from internal testing:

During a private home trial, NEO served drinks to guests and moved around so naturally that people eventually stopped paying attention to it.

This reveals something almost eerie about how quickly humans can normalize new technology, as long as it behaves in ways that feel familiar and non-threatening.

Source: Google.com

How Much Does NEO Robot Cost?

Owning a NEO won’t be cheap. In the U.S., preorders start at $20,000, or you can opt for a subscription model at $499 per month.

For many, that’s simply too much money for someone, or something, to fold laundry and mop the floor. For those of us outside the U.S., NEO isn’t expected to become available before 2027.

Is NEO Robot the Future or Just an Expensive Experiment?

The answer likely falls somewhere in between. NEO is not a perfect solution and not yet fully autonomous, but it is the first commercially available humanoid home robot that you can actually buy and use. That makes it the beginning of something new.

Remember the first smartphones? They were bulky, slow, limited, and extremely expensive. Now we can’t imagine life without them. If humanoid robots evolve at anything close to that trajectory, NEO truly could be the start of a new era.

NEO might mark the moment where household chores are no longer seen as obligations, but delegated tasks, allowing us to spend more time working, creating, and living while robots handle routine, boring responsibilities.

Of course, we must think carefully about who we allow into our homes and our data. When it comes to robots, the possibility of hacking and privacy invasion always exists.

Technological revolutions are rarely simple or smooth, but they are always exciting. And NEO is exactly that: an exciting beginning of something big.

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