Home Automation

Yes. Modern robot vacuums map your home, avoid obstacles, mop, empty themselves and run for weeks without attention. They still cannot pick up the clutter first, and stairs remain their nemesis.

It can react intelligently; genuine anticipation is patchy. Modern smart homes handle presence, light, heat and routines well, and LLM-driven assistants finally understand loose natural instructions. Predicting what you want before you ask still produces as many annoyances as wins.

Partly. An assistant can plan meals, build a basket and reorder your usual items, and some retailers offer their own AI basket builders. Fully hands-off shopping — choosing substitutions the way you would, spotting a bad price, adapting to what is actually in stock — still needs you to check the basket before checkout.

In a lab, yes. In your house, no. Research and demo robots fold towels and shirts at slow speed under good lighting, and general-purpose humanoids show it off constantly. Nothing you can buy will reliably empty a real basket of tangled mixed laundry.

No. Single-purpose home robots — vacuums, mowers, window cleaners — are genuinely good. A general machine that picks up whatever your family left on the floor, decides where it belongs and puts it away is a research problem, not a product.