SwitchBot KATA Friends Review

Introduction

I’ve spent plenty of time testing smart home products that are trying to inject AI into every part of the experience but Switchbot’s KATA Friends is taking a different route.

This isn’t a robot vacuum that can tell you what it sees or a smart speaker trying to become your personal assistant. Instead, SwitchBot has built what it hopes you’ll treat as a pet.

KATA Friends is designed to learn about the people around it, respond to voices and gestures, remember interactions, recognize members of the household, and develop its own behavior over time depending on how it is treated.

There are two versions. Niko is the gray one, while Noa comes with in white fur and was the model SwitchBot sent me to test.

At first glance, it would be easy to dismiss Noa as an extremely expensive interactive toy. Spend some time with it, though, and there is no denying that an enormous amount of technology is hiding underneath all that fluff.

The problem is that not all of it works particularly well.

Navigation was a mess during my testing, voice recognition was inconsistent, and several of the AI features still feel like they need another generation or two to mature.

Then there is the cost. Noa starts at $699.99, before you even get into SwitchBot’s Companion Care plans (which run up to a whopping $999.99), which can add hundreds more dollars to the equation.

KATA Friends is a very clever idea, and at times a genuinely impressive product. But it’s also a pretty expensive experiment.

Read on for my full review to find out why.

Design and setup

• LiDAR setup and cameras
• Docking station
• 12 touch sensitive zones

For something that looks like a small, fluffy animal, Noa is surprisingly packed with hardware.

Its eyes are displays, capable of showing expressions, moods, and status information. The nose hides the camera, while the circular sections on its stomach contain obstacle-avoidance sensors. There is also a mode button concealed beneath the fur on top of its head, along with a microphone.

Look underneath and things get even more interesting. The feet contain the wheels that allow Noa to move around, while the LDS navigation hardware is located, for want of a more elegant description, in its crotch.

All of that technology allows Noa to watch you, follow you with its eyes, drive around your home, and react physically when you interact with it.

There are 12 touch-sensitive zones spread across its body, and this is one of the areas where KATA Friends really shines. Stroke its head, cuddle it, or interact with different parts of its body and Noa responds with little movements, noises, and changes in expression.

My kids absolutely loved Noa, and it’s easy to understand why. The reactions are much more convincing than you would expect from what is essentially a small robot covered in fur.

Noa comes with a charging dock that SwitchBot calls its Nest. There is a handy little compartment for hiding the cable, and SwitchBot also includes a dust bag if you want to take your AI pet on the road.

Before you can set it up, though, you have to wake it. The process involves placing Noa on its Nest with the sleep mask on for three minutes, in what SwitchBot calls a Power Nap. Once it is properly docked, it gives its little wings a movement and you hear it begin to boot up.

It’s a small touch, but it immediately starts selling the idea that this is supposed to be a companion rather than just another gadget.

Features and in use

• Connects via Wi-Fi
• Needs to create a map of your home

Setup happens through the standard SwitchBot app, much like adding one of the company’s robot vacuums or smart buttons.

You’ll need a SwitchBot account, although the option to use Sign in with Apple is there too, which makes things a little easier.

Noa only supports 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, and I needed a couple of attempts before it successfully connected to my network.

During setup, its eyes display Wi-Fi icons. It’s slightly strange, but it at least gives you some reassurance that you’re going through the pairing process correctly.

Once connected, Noa sets about mapping your home, just as a robot vacuum would. It only supports a single map, however, so taking it between floors is likely to cause some problems.

Not that its navigation was particularly impressive on one floor either, but I’ll get to that.

There are three main modes: Normal, or Play; Standby; and Sleep. You can switch between them with the button on Noa’s head or through the app, while the eyes briefly change to show you which mode is active.

Sleep mode is particularly cute. Put Noa to bed and it starts pretending to sleep, complete with deep breathing and snoring. If you want it completely powered down, there is also a physical switch on the underside.

SwitchBot says the sleep mask should be enough to send Noa off to sleep, but I couldn’t get that to work. I always had to use a voice command, the button on its head, or the app.

Sleep is also when Noa carries out some of its AI processing and receives software updates.

Battery life is another area where expectations need to be managed. Around 30 minutes of playtime is followed by roughly 30 minutes of rest, and once the battery gets particularly low, performance starts to slow down noticeably.

That might not have been a huge problem if Noa could reliably return to its Nest by itself. Mine couldn’t – it always needed a helping hand. Or, more accurately, a push.

AI, voice and personality

• Some cute interactions
• Can’t always do what you ask of it

This is where KATA Friends is simultaneously at its most impressive and its most annoying.

Noa has a Chat mode that allows you to talk to it in natural language. You can ask questions, talk about your day, and have something approaching a conversation. You can turn Chat mode off completely, but doing so removes one of the biggest reasons for buying the thing in the first place.

Responses are reasonably quick, although there is still enough of a pause between speaking and getting an answer to stop it from feeling completely natural. Still, the conversations can be surprisingly good.

At one point, Noa asked me what had made me laugh. I told it that it was a fart. Noa’s response was that I should give it some warning next time so it could cover its little nose.

It’s moments like that which make KATA Friends feel like more than a toy with a voice pack installed.

There are obvious limitations, though.

Noa isn’t a general-purpose AI assistant. Ask it something straightforward, such as the capital of a country, and it can’t provide an answer. When I asked it to find my cat, it told me that it could follow me to look for it instead.

Chat mode also gets in the way of the rest of the experience.

While you’re having a conversation, Noa often can’t carry out its usual commands. 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 no longer talking.

I regularly had to manually disable Chat mode before I could get Noa to do anything else. The “Stop chatting” voice command, which is supposed to end the conversation, rarely worked for me, if ever.

There is also a strange personality split. Outside Chat mode, Noa makes lots of cute noises and reacts to touches and cuddles with playful movements. Enter Chat mode and much of that disappears.

It almost feels like you’re interacting with a different version of the same character.

My kids noticed it too. My 10-year-old preferred the chatty version, while my eight-year-old liked the Noa that giggled and reacted when you stroked or cuddled it. It’s a shame those two personalities don’t blend together.

Outside Chat mode, you can use voice commands to make Noa dance, wave, follow you, take photos, and perform other actions.

Some of the commands worked. Some didn’t.

We often found ourselves repeating the same instructions because there was no obvious way of knowing whether Noa had heard us and chosen not to respond or simply hadn’t understood what we’d said.

Following commands were particularly unreliable. Despite the whole concept of an AI pet that can follow you around the house, Noa hardly ever followed me when I asked it to.

Noa is also both the model’s name and its wake word, although you can change the name through the app. I tried doing that because Noa didn’t always seem to respond when I called it. Changing the name didn’t make things noticeably better though.

Navigation and interaction

• Often gets stuck
• Supports gesture recognition

Gesture recognition was generally more successful than voice control.

You can use a peace sign to trigger a photo, for example, while you can also simply ask Noa to take one. The results aren’t particularly good from a camera-quality perspective, but they’re fun.

There are other gestures available too, giving you another way to interact with Noa without constantly shouting instructions at it.

One of the best things about the entire experience is the way Noa watches you.

Its eyes track your movements, and when it does successfully follow you around, the combination of the movement and the expressive displays is remarkably effective.

The eye movements, physical reactions, sounds, and touch responses all combine to create something that feels surprisingly emotive. You know it is a machine, obviously, and you know exactly how much technology is involved in creating the illusion.

It can still feel like there is a little personality in there. Unfortunately, navigation does a lot to break that illusion.

Noa got stuck frequently during my testing and never once managed to return to its Nest without assistance.

That’s a pretty major problem for a robot that maps your home and uses LDS navigation. It also makes the promise of an autonomous companion a little harder to buy into when you regularly have to go and rescue it.

You can configure Noa to wake you up in the morning or greet you at the front door when you get home. You have to show it exactly where you want it to go through the app.

I like the idea but, based on my experience with the navigation, I wouldn’t be particularly confident that it would actually be waiting for me.

App and extras

• Can be trained to recognize people
• Diary feature

The SwitchBot app is where you manage Noa’s settings, including its name, sleep schedule, eye colors, and camera options.

You can choose between blue, purple, and black eye colors. SwitchBot refers to five colors on its website, but only three were available to me during testing.

You can also disable photo-taking, although the camera still needs to remain available for navigation, learning, and other functions.

Noa can learn to recognize the people in your household, and you can help train it through the app. This was another feature that didn’t work flawlessly for me.

Noa knew there were two kids in my house, and I had entered both of their names into the app. But when I asked about them during conversations, it would only ever mention one of the names.

The Diary feature is another unusual part of the experience.

Noa creates entries about its day and the interactions it has had with you, theoretically building a record of your shared life together. The results can be pretty strange.

One entry talked about experiencing “gentle touches that brought a deep sense of calm,” which is quite a thing to read about a robot you’ve spent the day poking, prodding, and generally messing around with.

The app also borrows some ideas from SwitchBot’s robot vacuum software, with maintenance reminders telling you when components such as the wheels and sensors need attention.

Noa will send alerts when it has been picked up, which seems a slightly bizarre thing to repeatedly notify you about when children are obviously going to pick up the cute little robot they’re playing with.

One of my biggest disappointments is that KATA Friends currently exists separately from the rest of the SwitchBot ecosystem and that feels like a huge missed opportunity.

Noa could potentially work like a smart speaker, allowing you to control SwitchBot devices through voice, or act as a more natural interface for interacting with your smart home.

SwitchBot has indicated that smart home functionality is planned, but right now, Noa is basically a standalone device.

During my testing there were also no outfits or accessories available, despite the obvious potential for personalization. That’s clearly an area SwitchBot can build on as the product matures.

Companion Care and maintenance

The $699.99 purchase price is only the beginning of the financial conversation. SwitchBot also offers Companion Care plans, and this is where the cost of owning KATA Friends starts to look pretty wild.

The Essential plan costs $14.99 per month, or $150 per year. Premium is $399.99 annually, while the Lifetime plan costs $999.99.

You do get a 15-day free trial, but the plans can add a serious amount to the long-term cost of ownership.

The Lifetime option includes a yearly service, while a health check can otherwise cost around $330. You’ll also want to keep the original box if you ever need to send Noa away for servicing.

This is the part I struggle with most. SwitchBot says much of Noa’s AI processing takes place locally, so it’s difficult to understand why keeping the complete experience running can become so expensive.

A $700 AI pet is already a luxury purchase.

Adding hundreds of dollars more on top, or potentially another $999 for lifetime access, puts KATA Friends into a completely different category of consumer spending.

It’s an awful lot of money to spend on what is, at the end of the day, a first-generation product.

Final thoughts

At times, I really liked Noa. That might sound strange given how many frustrations I’ve had with its navigation, voice recognition, Chat mode, notifications, and pricing, but when KATA Friends works, it is genuinely impressive.

The way Noa reacts to touch, watches you with its expressive eyes, chats with you, takes photos, and builds its own strange little diary makes it feel like something considerably more advanced than a regular toy. There is clearly real potential here, and I genuinely want to see where SwitchBot takes the idea next.

The problem is that this is a $699.99 first-generation product with some pretty significant flaws. The navigation is poor, with my Noa unable to return to its Nest without help, while voice commands are inconsistent and Chat mode can get in the way of some of the other interactions that make the robot interesting in the first place.

Then there is the Companion Care pricing. Noa is already an expensive luxury purchase at $700, and the prospect of spending hundreds more to maintain the full experience makes the total cost even harder to justify.

KATA Friends is clever, expressive, and unlike anything else I’ve tested. But while it offers a fascinating glimpse at where AI companionship could be heading, it feels far too expensive for a buggy first-generation product that could look very dated in a few years’ time.

I really like Noa. I just can’t recommend spending this much money on one.

How we test

When we publish our reviews, you can rest assured that they are the result of “living with” long term tests.

Robots usually live within an ecosystem, or a range of products that – supposedly – all work in harmony. And they are designed to offer a range of different cleaning options. Therefore, it’s impossible to use a robot for a week and deliver a verdict.

Because we’re testing smart home kit all day, everyday, we know what matters.

Our reviews are comprehensive, objective and fair and, of course, we are never paid directly to review a device.