Name: I Tried the First Humanoid Home Robot. It Was Wild.
Uploaded: 2025-10-28T17:58:00Z
Duration: 9 min 14 s
Description: The 1X Neo can do the dishes, clean the kitchen, even fold laundry. WSJ’s Joanna Stern spent time with the humanoid—and its creator—to see what it can really do and how much still requires a human operator’s help.

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The 1X Neo can do the dishes, clean the kitchen, even fold laundry.  WSJ’s Joanna Stern spent time with the humanoid—and its creator—to see what it can really do and how much still requires a human operator’s help. Photo: David Hall

https://m.wsj.net/video/20251028/85c77d7f-5e71-43f1-a18a-936ba8814165/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

The 1X Neo can do the dishes, clean the kitchen, even fold laundry.  WSJ’s Joanna Stern spent time with the humanoid—and its creator—to see what it can really do and how much still requires a human operator’s help.

I Tried the First Humanoid Home Robot. It Was Wild.

It's here, the first humanoid robot housekeeper. Thank you, Neo. For $20,000, you can pre-order 1X's Neo robot now, with delivery in 2026. I think you missed a tiny spot over here. Just one little catch. There may be a human behind the curtain pulling the robot strings. If I throw up, will the robot throw up?

Um.

A company representative may need to peer into your house via Neo's camera eyes to get things done. To many people, this is crazy.

You have to be okay with this for the product to be useful.

But is Neo a useful product? We're twinning now, Neo. Home robots have had two big challenges: creating a safe and capable body and a smart brain. 1X is taking on both of those, which is why Neo looks so different from a more industrial factory robot. Neo, it's 70 degrees here in California. Why are you wearing a sweater?

Neo: Good question. Bernt, why am I wearing a sweater?

It's a combination of safety and just also generally aesthetics. You can think of it kinda like a skin, except if it was an actual skin, that would probably be pretty creepy.

It would be creepy. But I actually wasn't all that creeped out by Neo.

Inside Neo, it really starts with some very, very powerful motors that we have developed here on 1X. These motors are so strong and light that, instead of using the classical gears that you see in robots, we can actually pull on tendons loosely inspired by biology and muscles. This allows Neo to move around not just quietly and smoothly, but also be very, very lightweight and be very low energy in motion, just like people.

That lightweight design is intended for our safety in case the 66-pound robot falls. Although Neo is capable of lifting up to 150 pounds, it's not as superhuman as you'd think. Crush it. It's a walnut.

There's this concept that we think that robots are like superhuman in like pressure and like strength.

Yeah.

And some robots are, because they're heavily geared, but that means you're not sensitive, right, and delicate. Neo doesn't work like this at all. It works more like us. So the finger strength of Neo is about the same as a human.

That body lets Neo try to do a lot of things humans do, emphasis on try. Can I get a water? If only the real world didn't have doors. All in, it took Neo a little over a minute to fetch a water from the fridge 10 feet away. Thank you, Neo. Next challenge: load three items in the dishwasher. You got this, Neo, you got it. And that took five minutes. The Neo I saw isn't the one shipping in 2026. The new model will be safer and have better hand dexterity. The one I saw still needed to take breaks to charge and cool down. The challenge isn't just Neo's body. It's also its brain. The body has to perform tasks safely, but the brain needs to know how to do them on its own without human help. But right now, everything I saw Neo do was guided by a skilled pilot.

Tele-operation is essentially when there is a human in the loop.

And who is the voice I'm hearing right now of Neo?

Neo: I am a remote operator in a different room in the building.

And what's your name?

Neo: Turing.

What's your real name?

Neo: My real name is Turing.

Like that's your name on your birth certificate?

Neo: Yes it is, believe it or not.

Alan Turing was, of course, the famous computer science and artificial intelligence pioneer. But this Turing with a VR headset and controllers was the one actually operating Neo. That is, until he handed me the controllers. I actually might throw up. I think my hand is. I have no idea where I'm facing. This is me doing the Macarena.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah, ooh, yeah. Yeah, we're fine.

And Neo had to go to urgent care. See you, Neo. Why does Neo need to be operated like this in the first place? Because its brain, AKA an AI neural network, needs to learn from more real-world experience. The videos of the robot doing things via tele-operation become the training data to make the AI model smarter. That's why 1X is putting Neo in the homes of early adopters.

I think it's quite important for me to just say that, in 2026, if you buy this product, it is because you're okay with that social contract. If we don't have your data, we can't make the product better. I'm a big fan of what I call like big brother, big sister principle, right? Big sister helps you. Big brother is just there to kinda monitor you. And we are very much the big sister. Depending on how much you want to trade, we can be more useful. And you decide where on that scale you want to be.

Do you right now know what things Neo, in 2026, will do autonomously versus what it will do tele-operated?

So when you get your Neo in 2026, it will do most of the things in your home autonomously. The quality of that work will vary and will improve drastically quite fast as we get data.

Joanna: To be clear, on my visit, I didn't see Neo do anything autonomously. The company did share this video of Neo autonomously opening the door.

You know, there's this new trending concept now called AI slop, right?

I do know.

It's a very powerful concept of, let's call it robotics slop. It's the most useful kind of slop. Because if you put all of my glasses from my dishwasher in my cabinet, I'm pretty happy.

Right.

It is going to be not perfect, but back to like just incredibly useful.

Neo might not fold my shirt perfectly, but if an arm is like kinda hanging out of the shirt, like, it's okay, it's robotic slop. It did an okay job.

To me, at least like, that's very okay.

Honestly, it isn't bad. Thank you. But the reality is, at least at first, much of Neo's work will be done by someone else. There will be an app where you can schedule tele-operation, specifying exactly what and when you want Neo to do things in your house.

So we wanna, of course, make sure that we respect privacy as much as possible and that it's always on your terms. You are always in control. Some examples of this is the tele-operator does not see you, right? We can blur people. Tele-operator also cannot go into specific parts of your home where you set no-go zones. So that's enforced on the software level. So even if the tele-operator tried, it cannot get the robot to go into those homes. And also the tele-operator can never connect to a robot unless you approve it.

Joanna: Other companies, like Figure and Tesla, are also racing to build humanoid robots and develop their own AI models to make them fully autonomous. As someone who's always dreamed of the home robot straight out of "The Jetsons."

Let's go home, Rosie.

Yes, ma'am.

Joanna: The dream finally feels within reach. But I also couldn't shake flashes of "Ex Machina." Do you have a name?

Ava.

Neo turns on the stove and throws some paper on and walks away. Can Neo do that? Will Neo do that?

Neo will not do that. Physically, can the robot do that? Yes. Physically, can a lot of products in your home do something dangerous if they decided to? Yes. We will ensure that that is not something that Neo is allowed to do. There are multiple layers of safety systems here that ensures that Neo cannot do something like this.

Neo decides to take a very heavy piece of wood, like the top of a table, and drop it on me when I'm sleeping.

Neo will not be able to or allowed to. It's physically capable of, but it will not be allowed to pick up something that is that heavy. So it's like things that Neo cannot do is like pick up something that is very hot, pick up something that's very heavy, pick up something that's very sharp.

Nice job, Neo, high five. Nice, oh, I'm over here. Spending the day with Neo was a bit like spending the day with a toddler learning how to do things in the world. Come on, you got more, oh, I'm gonna break the robot. The next few years isn't about owning a super useful robot. It's about raising one, letting it learn from your home, routines, and chores, all at the expense of the privacy of your inner sanctum. Even if you think this is all crazy, what Neo really signals is the beginning of physical AI in our lives and homes, a future where we may work alongside a new kind of machine.

What I really hope we can achieve is, in five years, everyone has a very high quality of life, everyone has a feeling of independence, irregardless of their age or any kind of disability. I do hope we can give people more of their agency back and people can focus on what they actually want to do.

No, like this, six seven, six seven.

Everything is now a tech thing. In creative and humorous videos, WSJ senior personal tech columnist Joanna Stern explains and reviews the products, services and trends that are changing our world.