Wake up, Neo
1X Technologies is a Norwegian-American robotics and AI company founded by Bernt Børnich back in 2014 (originally under the name Halodi). They’ve shifted their focus from industrial and healthcare robotics to domestic humanoid assistants for the home. Their product line includes NEO Beta (a prototype unveiled in August 2024) and the newer NEO Gamma, which they say is designed for real home environments. According to the company, they plan to have hundreds - maybe thousands - of units placed in homes by the end of 2026.
What the pitch suggests
On the marketing side it’s slick. NEO Gamma boasts a wide range of motion so it can walk with a natural human gait, squat, pick up objects, sit in chairs, and navigate cluttered living rooms without face-planting into the coffee table. It even wears a soft knit suit and shoes for safety and aesthetic reasons, like a well-dressed astronaut. The company’s pitch is clear: someday, you’ll have a robot helper in your home like Rosie from The Jetsons or Baymax from Big Hero 6.
To their credit, 1X isn’t hiding behind any hype. They’re open about the fact that these first deployments will be more like “research in progress” than “robot butler now available on Amazon.” The goal is to teach these robots how to do household chores by having human tele-operators control them remotely for a while.
The fine print
If you’re already planning your robot chore chart - slow down. In practice, this first wave is going to be much less glamorous. For now, the robot isn’t actually autonomous. Every action it performs is remotely controlled by a human operator wearing a VR headset somewhere else in the world. That person literally sees what the robot sees and moves its limbs accordingly.
So yes, technically, you’ll have a “robot” folding your laundry - but in reality, it’s a person controlling it from another country. And because this is all part of a learning process, those movements will be slow, clumsy, and occasionally tragic. Picture your laundry coming out looking like it was folded by a distracted toddler.
There are also safety rules. The operator isn’t allowed to pick up anything too hot, too sharp, or too heavy, so expect a lot of “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.” You’ll likely sign waivers about property damage too, because someone’s robot will knock over a vase or spill something expensive.
This isn’t a consumer-ready product yet. It’s more like joining a very expensive beta test - a $20,000 experiment where your home becomes an extension of 1X’s laboratory.
Why this still matters
Let me be clear - I’m not dunking on 1X here. What they’re doing is genuinely sci-fi levels of amazing. They’re transparent about their limitations, and the trailer they released for NEO Gamma is stunning. The technology is moving fast, and this tele-operated phase is a necessary step toward real autonomous household robots.
We’ve seen this evolution before. Remember how self-driving cars started with human safety drivers sitting behind the wheel? This is the same idea, just with a humanoid body instead of four wheels. For the robot to learn how to clean, cook, and adapt to human spaces, it needs thousands of hours of human-guided experience. That’s what these early adopters are paying for - to be part of the training process.
And honestly, there’s something kind of poetic about it. The first “robot butlers” won’t be perfect servants gliding silently around our homes. They’ll be awkward, clumsy, half-human experiments that remind us how hard it is to replicate the simplest human motions. Folding a shirt, stacking dishes, feeding a dog - all things we do without thinking - are immensely difficult for machines to master.
So yes, you can preorder a robot butler right now, but you’re not buying convenience yet. You’re buying into the dream. You’re helping train the robots that, maybe in five or ten years, will actually live up to the sci-fi promise.
The future of home robotics is here - it’s just still wearing training wheels.
