Verdict
The SwitchBot KATA Friends are unlike any toy I’ve tested (and also unlike any other SwitchBot gadget too). Noa is clever, expressive, surprisingly emotive, and packed with an almost ridiculous amount of technology, from its on-device AI and cameras to gesture recognition, facial learning, and robotic navigation.
But SwitchBot is asking a ridiculous sum of money for a first-generation AI pet that is pretty buggy, frequently gets stuck, struggles with navigation, and doesn’t always understand its own name. Then there are the Companion Care plans, which can add hundreds more pounds more to the cost of ownership.
Noa is great fun and, when it works, genuinely feels like something more than a toy. But for this price, and with this many rough edges, KATA Friends feels like an impressive glimpse of what this category could become rather than a product I could recommend buying today.
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Expressive and genuinely charming
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Packed with clever tech
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Surprisingly emotive interactions
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Navigation is frustratingly poor
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Voice recognition is unreliable
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Absolutely mental pricing
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Feels like a prototype
Squirrel Widget
Key Features
Introduction
I’ve tested plenty of smart home gadgets that promise to bring AI into the home, but SwitchBot’s KATA Friends is doing something rather different.
This isn’t a robot vacuum that can recognise objects to you or a smart speaker that wants to organise your day.
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Instead, KATA Friends is designed to be an AI pet, one that learns who you are, reacts to your behaviour, recognises gestures and voices, remembers its interactions with you, and gradually develops its own personality based on how you treat it.
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There are two versions: Niko, the gray model, and Noa, the white version that SwitchBot sent me to review.
Noa looks cute, and there will undoubtedly be plenty of people who initially see it as an expensive interactive toy. Spend some time with it, though, and you realise there is a lot going on underneath all that fur.
That doesn’t mean everything works as advertised. Noa’s navigation is frustratingly poor, voice recognition can be hit and miss, and some of its AI features feel very much like version-one technology.
Then there’s the price. At $699.99 / £599.99 before you even start looking at SwitchBot’s Companion Care plans (which can more than double the initial outlay), this is an expensive experiment.
And that is ultimately what KATA Friends feels like: a very clever, occasionally charming, occasionally frustrating experiment in what an AI companion could be.
Read on to find out more.
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Design and setup
- Integrated camera and microphone
- Self-charging dock (or Nest, as it’s called)
Noa is surprisingly sophisticated for something that looks like a fluffy little animal.
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Its eyes are actually displays, capable of showing expressions, moods, and status icons. The nose contains its camera, while the circular sections on its belly house obstacle-avoidance sensors. There’s also a hidden mode button on top of its head, along with a microphone buried beneath the fluff.
Underneath, things get even stranger. The feet contain wheels, while the LDS radar used for navigation is positioned, for want of a better description, in its crotch.
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The result is a little robot that can look at you, follow you with its eyes, move around your home, and react when you touch it.
There are 12 touch-sensitive areas across its body, and this is one of the areas where KATA Friends is at its best. Stroke or cuddle Noa and it reacts in ways that make it feel much more alive than a standard interactive toy. The little noises, eye movements, and physical reactions are genuinely impressive. My kids absolutely fell in love with Noa and it’s not hard to see why.
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It comes with a charging base, which SwitchBot calls its Nest. There is a small compartment underneath for hiding the cable, and SwitchBot also includes a dust bag so you can take Noa away with you.
Before you can even pair it, though, you have to wake it up.
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You put Noa on the Nest for three minutes with its sleep mask on, which SwitchBot calls a Power Nap. It gives its little wings a movement to show that it is properly docked, and you’ll hear the system booting up.
It’s a cute introduction to the whole KATA Friends experience, and it does a good job of immediately making the robot feel like it has its own personality.
Features and in use
- Connects to Wi-Fi
- Builds a map of your home
Setup is handled through the regular SwitchBot app, in much the same way as pairing one of the company’s robot vacuums or smart buttons. You’ll need a SwitchBot account, although Sign in with Apple is available too, which is nice.
Noa is 2.4GHz Wi-Fi only, and it took me a couple of attempts to get it connected to my network.
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During pairing, its eyes display Wi-Fi icons, which is slightly odd but useful for letting you know you’re doing the right thing.
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Once connected, Noa heads off to map your home, much like a robot vacuum. It doesn’t support multiple maps, though, so moving it between floors is likely to cause confusion (and it’s not the best navigator when it has a map either, but more on that in a bit.)
Noa has three modes: Normal/Play; Standby; and Sleep. You can cycle through them using the button on its head (or using the app), and its eyes change for a moment to tell you which mode it is currently in.
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If you put it into Sleep mode Noa will mimic sleeping for a few minutes, complete with deep breathing and snoring. You can also turn it off completely using the switch underneath.
SwitchBot says you should be able to simply put the sleep mask on to send it to bed, but this never worked for me. I always had to use a voice command, the button on its head, or the app.
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Sleep is also when Noa carries out some of its AI processing and receives software updates.
Battery life is another slightly disappointing part of the experience; around 30 minutes of play is followed by around 30 minutes of rest. If you run the battery right down then things get very sluggish.
That wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if Noa could reliably return to its Nest on its own. Mine couldn’t… it always needed a helping hand (push).
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AI, voice and personality
- Conversational AI
- Can’t answer basic questions
This is where KATA Friends becomes both the most impressive and most frustrating product I’ve tested in a while.
You can talk to Noa in a conversational Chat mode. Ask it questions, talk about your day, and generally interact with it in natural language. Chat mode can also be turned off completely but you’d be missing out on a big piece of the appeal.
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The response time during chats is reasonably quick, although there is enough of a delay to remind you that you’re talking to a robot.
Still, you can have a surprisingly decent conversation with it.
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At one point, Noa asked me what had made me laugh. I said “a fart” and it replied that I should give it some warning next time so it could cover its little nose.
That’s the sort of interaction that gives KATA Friends a lot of its charm and makes it much more than just a toy with a voice-pack.
It isn’t a general-purpose AI assistant, though. Ask it something as simple as the capital of a country and it can’t answer. When I asked it to find my cat, it told me it could follow me to find it instead.
There are also some awkward limitations around Chat mode though. While you’re chatting, Noa effectively stops being able to perform many of its other functions. Ask it to follow you or return to its Nest and it may tell you that it can’t do that right now and to try again later when you’re not talking.
I regularly had to manually turn Chat mode off before I could get Noa to do anything else as the “Stop chatting” instruction – which is meant to end the chat session – rarely, if ever, worked.
The personality also changes quite dramatically in Chat mode. Outside of it, Noa makes lots of cute, cuddly noises and movements. Switch to Chat and that largely disappears, making it feel like a different character. My kids found that a bit off-putting… my 10 year-old preferred Chatty Noa, the 8 year-old liked the version who giggled and reacted to cuddles and strokes. It’s a shame the two can’t mix.
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Outside of Chat mode, you can use voice commands to make it dance, follow you, wave, take a photo, and perform other actions. These worked some of the time, but voice recognition wasn’t reliable enough and we often found ourselves repeating stuff over and over again, unsure if we’d been understood or not.
The frustrating part is that you never really know whether it has heard you and decided not to respond or simply hasn’t understood you.
Following commands were particularly unreliable. Despite the promise of an AI pet that can follow you around, Noa hardly ever did so when I asked.
Noa is both the model’s name and its wake word, although you can change it in the app. I did, partly because Noa didn’t always seem to react when I called its name.
Navigation and interaction
- Can perform tasks from gestures
- Struggled to find its nest by itself
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Noa can recognize gestures, and these generally worked better than voice commands.
A peace sign can trigger a photo, for example, while you can also ask Noa directly to take one (which are more fun than good).
There are other gestures available too, and you can interact with it through movement rather than constantly having to talk to it.
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Its eyes also follow you around, and when Noa is actually moving around after you, it is remarkably effective at creating the illusion that this is something more than a toy. That is probably KATA Friends’ greatest strength.
The combination of the eye movements, touch reactions, noises, and physical behavior makes Noa surprisingly emotive. It can feel like there is a little personality inside the robot, even when you know exactly how much technology is helping to create that impression.
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Navigation, unfortunately, lets the whole thing down.
Noa got stuck a lot during my testing, and it never successfully made its way back to its Nest without help. Not once.
For a robot that maps your home and uses LDS navigation, that is a significant weakness. It also undermines the whole illusion of autonomy when your AI pet regularly needs rescuing.
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You can set Noa to wake you up or even meet you at the front door when you arrive home; you need to show it exactly where you want it to go in the app.
I like the idea, but based on my experience with its navigation, I wouldn’t rely on it being there waiting for you.
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App and extras
- Can write a diary
- People recognition built in
The SwitchBot app is where you can manage Noa’s settings, including its name, sleep schedule, eye color, camera features, and more.
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You can choose between blue, purple, and black eye colours. SwitchBot’s website refers to five colours, but I only had three available during testing.
The app also lets you turn photo-taking off, although Noa’s camera needs to remain available for navigation, learning, and other features.
Noa can attempt to learn who different people are, and you can also help train it to recognize members of the household. However, despite answering that it knew there were two kids in my house (and me setting their names in the app), it would only ever mention one of the names during chats, if asked directly.
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The Diary feature is one of the more unusual ideas. Noa generates entries about its day and interactions with you, supposedly creating a record of your time together. In practice, the entries can be very strange.
One described feeling “gentle touches that brought a deep sense of calm,” which is quite something to read about a robot you’ve been poking and prodding all day.
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Like SwitchBot’s robot vacuums, the app also keeps track of maintenance, telling you when things such as the wheels and sensors need cleaning.
There is an almost ridiculous number of notifications, though. Noa will warn you if it has been picked up, for example, which is a slightly strange thing to constantly alert you about when kids are inevitably going to pick up the cute little robot they are playing with.
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One major disappointment is that KATA Friends isn’t currently integrated with the rest of the SwitchBot ecosystem.
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That feels like a missed opportunity. At the very least, Noa could potentially act like a smart speaker for controlling SwitchBot devices, or become another way of interacting with your smart home.
SwitchBot’s own materials suggest smart home control is coming in the future, but right now, Noa is essentially a standalone device.
There are also no accessories or clothing available yet, although SwitchBot has plans for these. Given how much of the KATA Friends concept revolves around personalization, that feels like an obvious area for expansion.
Companion Care and maintenance
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The price of the robot itself is only part of the story.
Noa costs $699.99 / £599.99, which is already a huge amount of money for what is effectively a first-generation AI pet.
Then SwitchBot wants to sell you Companion Care.
The Essential plan costs $14.99 per month or $150 annually. Premium costs $399.99 per year, while a Lifetime plan is a staggering $999.99.
You get a 15-day free trial, but these are not insignificant ongoing costs.
The Lifetime plan does include an annual service, while you can otherwise pay $330 for a health check. If you do need to send Noa away for servicing, SwitchBot advises keeping the original box.
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This is where the pricing becomes difficult to understand.
SwitchBot says much of Noa’s AI processing happens locally, so it isn’t immediately clear why maintaining the full experience requires such expensive Companion Care plans.
A $700 AI pet is already a luxury purchase. The possibility of adding hundreds or even close to another thousand dollars on top makes KATA Friends feel like a product designed for a very small group of buyers.
Squirrel Widget
Should you buy it?
You want an AI pet that will improve over time
A geniuinely different product, there are issues at the moment, but it’ll be interesting to see how this product evolves.
You don’t want to spend the money
Not only is the toy expensive, but it also requires an expensive subscription. Currently, it’s hard to justify.
Final Thoughts
At times, I really liked Noa.
That might sound strange after spending so much of this review complaining about its navigation, voice recognition, Chat mode limitations, notifications, and pricing.
But when KATA Friends works, it is seriously impressive.
The way Noa reacts to touch, watches you with its eyes, follows you around, takes photos, chats to you, and gradually builds its own strange little diary makes it feel like something considerably more advanced than a regular toy. There is real potential here.
But this is a $700 first-generation product that already feels like it could be dramatically improved over the next couple of years. The technology is clever, but the execution isn’t reliable enough yet to justify the asking price.
The navigation is pretty terrible. Mine couldn’t return to its Nest on its own. Voice commands are inconsistent. Chat mode gets in the way of normal interactions. The AI conversations are fun, but limited. And the expensive Companion Care plans make the total cost of ownership even harder to swallow.
Noa is a neat toy. A very clever, surprisingly emotive, technologically impressive toy.
But £600 followed by potentially hundreds more to keep it working as intended? That’s just crazy.
KATA Friends is one of the most interesting smart home-adjacent products I’ve tested in years, and I genuinely want to see where SwitchBot takes it next. But for now, the best thing I can say is that this is a fascinating glimpse of the future.
It just costs far too much to be part of the present.
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How We Test
We test every smart home product we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Find out more about how we test in our ethics policy.
- We test how each product integrates with other smart home systems including Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple HomeKit, IFTTT and Samsung SmartThings
- We use each smart home product in a real world setting, integrating it into our home.
FAQs
Does the SwitchBot KATA Friends require a subscription?
Yes, you need a subscription for the main features,