This robot companion is a cameraman for your pet

For a long time, tech companies have pitched pet cameras as a way to find out what your furball is up to when you’re not home. Vex, a new robot companion launched at CES this week, takes that a step further: it follows your pet around, filming as it goes, and uses AI smarts to stitch together a video from the footage.

Vex is a small white sphere that comes with cute, stubby limbs, ears, and accessories in a range of colors. It’s compact enough to hold in one hand, so will almost certainly be smaller than whatever pet you want it to film.

It’s autonomous enough to follow your cat or dog around the house and play with them, and uses visual recognition to identify specific pets. It films as it goes, catching low-angle footage that should come a little closer to your pet’s perspective, and cuts each day’s footage into “moving narratives and shareable stories.” Manufacturer FrontierX hasn’t actually shared an example of that edited footage though, which will be the real test of whether this is worthwhile.

It’s joined by Aura, a larger spherical bot with a circular screen for a face. This is being sold more as a companion bot for people, with the ability to read body language and facial expressions to understand your mood. Like Vex it can follow you around, and even talk to you with the help of LLM-powered conversational features.

Vex and Aura are both still in development — FrontierX is in such an early stage that it doesn’t even have a website live yet, just a barebones Instagram page. Still, the company says it will be ready to take preorders in the next six months, though hasn’t said how much either robot will cost.