Matic Robot Vacuum Adds Voice and Gesture Controls

Matic began rolling out Cues on August 13. The company’s launch video shows a child pointing at spilled milk and saying, “Hey Matic, clean this,” before the robot drives over and mops the spot.

Pointing gives the command a place

Cues uses one model to listen for the “Hey Matic” wake phrase, another to work out where the voice came from, and a third to recognize a person’s hand and pointing direction. Those three models run on the robot.

The gesture model turns the direction of a finger into a location inside Matic’s 3D map. That lets a short command such as “clean this” carry both an action and a place without opening the phone app and drawing an area on the map.

Voice commands can include more detail. Matic lists examples such as vacuuming a room, cleaning carpet edges, starting a saved schedule, and following the speaker.

Gemini handles commands after the chime

Cues is off by default. Owners must opt in before the robot’s microphones turn on, and they can disable the feature again in Settings.

Matic says the wake phrase is detected locally and other ambient audio is discarded. After the robot hears “Hey Matic” and plays a chime, the spoken command is sent over an encrypted connection to the Gemini API for parsing. The company says the request is anonymous, contains no user information, and is not stored.

Camera data used to recognize a person and a pointing hand remains on the robot, according to Matic. The company is also developing a smaller on-device command model, although it may initially support only the most common commands and English.

Cues arrives as a software update

Cues is rolling out to Matic owners as a software feature rather than new hardware. The robot vacuum and mop currently starts at $1,245 in the United States through September 9, down from its regular $1,495 price, and Matic says (opens in a new tab) new orders ship in three to five days.

The larger test will come in real homes, where voices, rooms, hands, people, and everyday messes rarely line up as neatly as they do in a launch video. For now, Cues gives Matic owners a more natural alternative to reaching for the app whenever the floor needs attention.