Copyright © Françoise Herrnann
The Norwegian start-up, 1X, backed by Open AI, released its first bipedal, humanoid housekeeper robot, on April 30th, 2026. The robot’s name is Neo.
As an interactive, residential home assistant, Neo is intended to automate household tasks. Tasks programmed for Neo to autonomously execute, such as cleaning, fetching (eg., a glass of water), loading and unloading the dishwasher, answering the front door, vacuuming, taking out the trash, unloading packages from a car trunk, cracking walnuts, plus more. Indeed, almost any task you can think of, since Noe learns by watching.
For Neo to learn the new complex tasks, you might schedule a 1X Expert Mode Session, where a remote company technician walks Neo through all the new tasks—in Virtual Reality, using Neo’s camera eyes. A process that raises controversy, considering that the remote technician, or anyone else, is gaining access, through the robot's camera eyes, to the inside of your home, during the expert session. To which 1X responds: "You have to be OK with this, for the product to be useful."
The video below shows some of what Neo is capable of doing.
Neo robots are produced at a 58,000-square-foot facility in Hayward, California. The first vertically integrated humanoid factory, plus 200 workers. In other words, this facility produces everything, from raw materials to finished robot, including motors, sensors, batteries and structural transmission system. The company plans to ship 10,000 robots in 2026, the first year of operations, and then scale to 100,000 robots in 2027. Neo costs 20,000 USD or 499 USD per month. You can order one with a 200 USD deposit.
References
1X (company web site)
Open AI
