Matic has introduced a new feature called Matic Cues, giving owners another way to control the company’s robot vacuum without relying entirely on its mobile app. With the update, users can speak directly to the robot and combine voice commands with gestures to indicate where and how they want it to clean.
The feature is being distributed to existing Matic owners through a firmware update. According to Matic, Cues supports more than 70 languages and can respond to commands ranging from general cleaning requests to instructions involving specific rooms or areas of the home.
Matic Cues Demo
Matic Cues Adds Direct Voice Control
Users begin a request with the “Hey Matic” wake phrase and can then issue commands such as “vacuum the kitchen,” “mop the kitchen,” “follow me,” or “return to the dock.” The robot can also use the names assigned to rooms within its saved map when interpreting cleaning requests.
Matic’s display and physical movements provide feedback as it responds. For example, the display can indicate that the robot is listening, following the user, or returning to its dock.
Brian Heater, managing editor for the Association for Advancing Automation, received early access to the feature and described his experience in an A3 Industry Insights article. During his initial testing, he used commands that directed Matic to follow him, return to its dock, and clean a specified room.
According to Heater, the gesture-recognition component had not yet been activated during his early testing.
See our full review of the Matic robot vacuum.
Pointing Can Direct Matic to a Mess
Gesture recognition expands the system beyond voice-only control. A user can point toward an area and tell the robot to “clean this,” allowing Matic to identify the direction of the gesture and navigate toward the indicated location.
The company says the robot recognizes the user’s hand and follows the direction of the pointing gesture to determine where cleaning is needed. This is made possible using Matic’s existing onboard cameras and spatial-awareness system.
The company has been working toward this type of interaction for several years. Matic CEO Mehul Nariyawala told A3 that it was a feature the company had been waiting to deliver since its founding in 2017. Matic’s own development timeline traces early “clean this” demonstrations back to a prototype from 2018.
Top 20 Robot Vacuums
Explore Vacuum Wars’ always up-to-date rankings of the best robot vacuums, based on independent, hands-on testing. We purchase every unit ourselves and have evaluated more than 150 models, giving us a deep benchmark for cleaning performance, navigation, battery life, and advanced features like obstacle avoidance and mopping.
How Matic Says It Handles Voice and Camera Data
Matic says the “Hey Matic” wake phrase and gesture recognition are processed on the robot. According to the company, ambient audio is analyzed only for the wake phrase and is not recorded, stored, or transmitted.
After the robot detects the wake phrase and plays a chime, the spoken command is sent anonymously through an encrypted connection for processing using the Gemini API. Matic says user information is not attached to the request.
The company also says images used for gesture detection remain on the robot and are immediately discarded after processing. Owners must opt in to activate Cues, and the microphones can be turned off again through the robot’s settings. More information about the system is available in Matic’s explanation of its voice and gesture data handling.
A More Natural Approach to Robot Vacuum Control
Voice control is not new to robot vacuums, with many models already supporting commands through platforms such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, or Siri Shortcuts. Matic Cues differs by combining direct voice interaction with the robot’s onboard vision and gesture recognition.
This allows the robot to respond not only to a spoken room name or saved routine but also to the direction in which a person is pointing. If the feature works as described, it could make targeted cleaning more immediate by reducing the need to open an app, edit a map, or manually position the robot.
Additional details and demonstrations are available on the official Matic Cues product page.
If Vacuum Wars reviews this product, we will make our findings available in the Robot Vacuum Reviews area of this website. Top ranking models are added to our Best Robot Vacuums list.
