Physical AI, with a social life
From furry AI pets to human-shaped companions, we track what exists, what moves, what remembers you and what you can actually buy in Britain.
“Companion robot” now covers machines with radically different abilities. Some roll around the house. Some learn how you touch them. Some are built to look human. We keep the labels attached to the hardware.
A wheeled £999 home companion with mapping, face recognition, cameras and GPT conversation. Currently out of stock in the UK.
Reality check →
Warm-bodied, mobile and deliberately needy. More than 20,000 active contracts as of July 2026, according to GROOVE X.
LOVOT reality check →
A full human-form companion is already listed for £64,700 in Britain. The evidence around what it can actually do needs careful reading.
X04-SYNC2, 18+ topic →What is the machine actually doing? A chatbot in a head, an autonomous pet, a mobile camera and speaker, or a humanoid with meaningful physical agency are different products even when all four are sold as “AI companions”.
We track locomotion, recognition, memory, touch, expression, cloud dependence, subscriptions and whether the robot can physically interact with its surroundings.
Verified specifications, public demonstrations and retailer promises do not get treated as the same thing. That distinction will matter more as marketing gets excitable.
We are deliberately launching small. The tracker will grow as products become real enough to deserve an entry, and the deeper pages will go to robots where there is something useful to say.