In a presentation at IFA 2025, Deebot's parent company Ecovacs (full disclosure: travel and accommodation were paid by ECOVACS, but Gizmodo did not guarantee coverage as a condition for accepting trips) repeatedly stated that AI smarts in its new X11 Omnicycleclone Robot Vacuum are all on-vice. Or most of them are anyway. Later I returned to the booth and spoke with several company representatives to try and figure out exactly how Deebot X11 Omnicycleclone divorced from Cloud. Is it all the device experiences like the vacuum of a matic robot, or does it require an internet connection to maintain its best functionality?
The promise of the Deebot X11 Omnicyclone is that you can use your local AI smart to identify floor spills and confusions and decide what mopping solution to use if you need mopping (there are several options for the X11 charging dock). You can also learn from your routine, change your cleaning schedule and morph, and approach it over time to match your actions.
You, the owner, can talk to AI agent Yiko. This is the name of a refreshed, generative AI-powered vacuum assistant, at least according to ECOVACS, providing fairly extensive and natural language requests. I couldn't test this. I wanted to know how big it was. Can you say “Just a little Yiko, I'll just clean my bedroom on Friday”? The people at Ecovacs said yes. “Hey Yiko, clean around the table in my dining room every night at 7pm.” Yes, that's possible, but the person in charge told me that you might need to name that table when you speak your request and call it with that particular name. Again, I was unable to test any of this.
According to the representative, it's not a problem if the internet goes down. In that case, you will lose many functions. The app no longer works as it bounces back through the US ECOVACS cloud infrastructure to do so. You won't move around any more, telling the robot to clean a particular room, remotely control it from your smartphone, or watching a saved video recorded cloud while doing so. Also, the device generation AI voice assistant is cloud-dependent, so Yiko doesn't mean anything.
However, there is a way to use a robot vacuum. The ECOVACS Home App has an “agent hosting” mode that allows you to switch your Deebot X11 Omnicycleclone to AI-Only Control, essentially making sure that all of your faiths are properly cleaned in the home. At least according to Ecovacs, it might be possible. This says it can recognize over 100 different categories of objects. If you switch to that mode and find it's fine to clean your home without input from you, you may never mind the app again. And in the case that's right In your case, you may not know when the internet is out or that the Deebot X11 Omnicycleclone has lost its connection to the network.
That doesn't mean that robots are useless. An Ecovacs representative said without an internet connection, the Deebot X11 Omnicyclone's onboard AI can slide schedules to schedules as needed, identify confusion and switch cleaning approaches. I asked if even AI voice assistants are on the ground and they are looking at the future that their staff are not sure about.
It's not the world I want to see. My smart home devices do not require an internet connection to bring about a full feature set. But it's an encouraging movement in that direction, assuming everything works, as Ecovacs says. And in AI, it can be a big “if”.
