Matic robot vacuum can now clean the spot you point at, and I want one for my Labrador
Four of the five biggest robot vacuum brands on Earth are Chinese. IDC’s Q1 2025 tracker put Roborock at 19.3% of global shipments, Ecovacs at 13.6%, Dreame at 11.3%, and Xiaomi at 9.9%, with iRobot clinging to fifth place at 9.3% while its shipments dropped 30.6% year on year. The only American name in that top five filed for bankruptcy in December.
Matic, a Mountain View company with more than 13,000 robots in customers’ homes, shipped a firmware update on August 13 that lets its vacuum hear you and watch your hands. Say “Hey Matic,” point at whatever your dog dragged in, tell it to clean there, and off it goes. The feature is called Matic Cues, it covers more than 70 languages, and every Matic already out in the world gets it free.
Pointing is the half nobody else has. Onboard voice assistants are old news, and Roborock, Ecovacs and Narwal all ship one, while almost every robot on sale answers to Alexa or Google Home. None of them can watch you jab a finger at a patch of floor and work out which patch you meant. Matic’s founders have been chasing that trick since they left Google.
The mess my Labrador tracks in doesn’t fit a rectangle
I have a Labrador and cats, so the floor problem in my home arrives on nobody’s schedule. Eight in the morning, a wet walk just finished, and a grit trail runs the length of the hallway. The litter kicked past the tray is its own separate grievance. Every robot vacuum I’ve read about answers all of it with a map editor, and I’ve never once believed I’d open an app and drag a rectangle over a hallway before breakfast.
Matic runs gesture recognition on the five cameras already bolted to the robot, which is why a machine bought two years ago can do it. Wake it, wait for it to turn toward your voice, point, speak. The robot picks out your hand, works out the direction it’s aimed in and heads that way, with its display telling you whether it’s listening, following or going back to the dock. The company has been demoing that trick since a prototype in 2018, so the eight-year wait suggests the aiming is the difficult part.
Nobody has to memorize the magic phrase
Gemini handles the parsing, which buys loose wording. That matters far more to me than the language count in the press release. “Vacuum the kitchen” and “return to the dock” are the obvious ones, and the robot will pull the names you gave rooms on its saved map, so a command doesn’t have to match anything Matic wrote down. Follow me is the one I’d get the most out of, walking a Labrador’s muddy route back through the house with the vacuum in tow.
The robot doesn’t answer out loud. It shows what it heard on its little display and gets on with the job. Living with a Lab who barks at the doorbell, I’d take one fewer voice in the house every time, and “Hey Matic, go away” sending it back to the dock is the command I’d wear out first.
The no-cloud pitch takes a dent
Matic built its name on keeping your home off the internet, and it has hammered that point in its marketing for years. Maps stay on the robot, where the company can’t see them. The vacuum runs with no connection at all, which is most of the reason anyone pays a four-figure price for a machine that sucks up crumbs.
Cues changes the arrangement. The wake phrase and the gesture recognition run on the robot, camera frames used for pointing are thrown away immediately after processing, and the company says ambient audio is never recorded or transmitted. Everything spoken after the chime goes to Google’s servers, anonymized and encrypted. Co-founder and president Mehul Nariyawala says cloud processing bought the language coverage and the loose phrasing, and Matic plans to pull the 20 or 30 most-used commands back onto the device later.
The feature is opt-in, and the microphones can be switched off again in settings. I’d switch them on. Owners who chose a Matic specifically over a Roborock on privacy grounds have a decision to make, and the audible chime, which fires whenever anything leaves the robot, is the single most honest design choice in the whole update.
$1,245 until September 9
Matic robot vacuum
A Matic costs $1,245 today and climbs to $1,495 on September 9, an increase the company puts down to memory and component prices. Shipping your marquee feature three weeks ahead of a $250 rise is a sales move, and I don’t hold it against them. Anyone circling the purchase should stop circling.
More than 13,000 have sold, and the fleet has cleaned close to 400 million square feet. The number I keep coming back to is seven, the average weekly runs per household. Owners of cheap bots let them idle for weeks, so heavy use at a four-figure price suggests the robot earns its keep in a way the spec sheet can’t argue for.
Matic’s rivals can’t launch a new model here
The FCC added foreign-produced advanced robotic devices to its Covered List on July 28, a category that swallows most robot vacuums sold in America. Machines already approved carry on selling, and their firmware keeps updating until January 1, 2029, so nobody’s Roborock turns into a brick over this. The trouble is new models, which need conditional approval from the Department of War, or a 65% US-content cost threshold that no vacuum maker looks close to meeting.
Matic sources plenty of parts abroad, but design and assembly happen in the US, and Nariyawala says his conversations with the FCC have gone well enough that he expects no trouble with future hardware. Nine years of work happen to land the company’s best feature in the exact quarter its rivals stopped being able to launch new models here. No marketing department could have bought that timing.
Related: Best affordable robot vacuum for pet hair on hardwood floors vs. carpet
