The Matic Robot Vacuum
Forget flying cars—in the future, your apartment will clean itself
Every 20 years or so, like a wandering asteroid, I like to visit the headquarters of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), in the heart of Silicon Valley—Mountain View, California. That is to say, I went in 2005, when SETI had been looking for aliens for 20 years. This summer, I dropped in again to see how things were going.
The short answer is that SETI is still waiting for E.T., despite having had a huge private investment that has allowed them to run vastly more powerful antennas. It was a fascinating visit nonetheless, and I discovered, among many other things, that for science undergrads, getting a summer internship at SETI is tougher than getting into Harvard or Yale.
On the way out of SETI’s office, I couldn’t help noticing a squat vacuuming robot I’d never seen before. “Take me to your cleaner,” I said, rather wittily I thought, to SETI’s inspirational C.E.O., Bill Diamond. He stopped. “Yes, we are trialing this for a start-up—actually, our downstairs neighbors,” Diamond said.
So I had a chat with the neighbors, Matic, who are indeed new and very small but making waves in the robot-vacuum world. Early adopters have declared that the Matic is the best robot vacuum ever, and Wired magazine just gave it a rare 10-out-of-10 rating.
I haven’t yet had the chance to test a Matic, but I so badly want to be the first to proclaim their alien connection that I’m jumping the gun to get the news out there. And if your Matic sucks—or perhaps doesn’t—they offer a 60-day money-back deal, anyway.
What else is there to say about Matic, other than that it’s small but rather tall for a robot vacuum, which might prevent it from getting under some furniture? Well, it’s very cute—“more Wall-E than Roomba,” one critic said. It’s not as powerful as most rivals, and the co-founders, both Silicon Valley engineers, argue that sheer vacuum power is overrated. They say the Matic will deal with pet hair, though.
Among other pluses, it’s very quiet, at 50 to 55 decibels. I heard it running and can confirm that it’s the level of a murmured conversation or a gentle room fan. It’s also commendably simple. The apps on these things, especially the Chinese ones, tend to be so fiendishly complex you may end up preferring to have dirty floors.
Matic is also a hard floor/carpet combo, and it automatically switches between the two modes, which I regard as a non-negotiable feature. The company promises that, although the Matic is loaded with A.I., it doesn’t gather or sell data from your home, which is reassuring.
The Zophi Antique Identifier App
Not sure if those chairs are Louis XIV or Louis XVI? This app can tell you
At some point by, say, this time next year, we may cease to be amazed by generative A.I. At the moment, though, we are still as astonished as people were in 1995 that you could order a book on the Internet.
Nonetheless, I’m still happy to be astounded, and rarely have I been more so than by a new wave—new as in literally the past few weeks—of antique-recognition apps.
The one I’ve been trying and rather liking is called Zophi, but there’s a bunch of others, such as Curio and AI Vintage. Zophi seems to have come out of Dubai but may also have Lithuanian roots—it’s never easy to determine the provenance of an app. Zophi’s sister A.I.-based products are a stamp-identifier app and a tick recognizer.
Zophi is super-simple: point your phone’s camera at an antique, or feed it a photograph you already have, and in a few seconds you’ll get information, including a range of valuations in U.S. dollars.
I’ve been finding it varies from uncannily accurate to a bit lame, but mostly very good indeed. It dated a grandfather clock and correctly noted it was Scottish. It also correctly identified a rare mid-19th-century pottery window-sash stop made in Vermont in the form of George Washington’s head. It was spot-on with a textile screen print by the mid-20th-century English artist John Piper (estimated price: $5,000 to $7,000, which was a surprise).
Naturally, I tried to fool it. Pointing the camera at my antique face, Zophi correctly, if rather dourly, said, “The image shows a person’s face, not an antique or collectible item.” Set to check out a photo of the Mona Lisa on my laptop screen, it almost yawned and said, “The image shows a digital reproduction of the Mona Lisa on a computer screen.” Faced with an “antique” 1989 Motorola cell phone I bought at a market stall in Hong Kong, it was unfazed and gave a $200 valuation.
The Plaud Note Pro
An improved version of the beloved recording device that also takes notes for you
The Plaud Note, a stylish, credit-card-size audio recorder that partners with an app to transcribe your conversations, was pretty much my favorite product of last year. It was a feat of miniature electronics, A.I., and industrial design, all rolled into one tiny device.
Eighteen months later, Plaud, a Chinese company previously registered in a cowboy town in Wyoming and now more reassuringly incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in San Francisco, has released a new model. Inevitably, it’s called the Plaud Note Pro and has several exciting new features and capabilities.
The Plaud Note Pro has a tiny screen so you can be sure it’s on and recording—two things that were a little vague previously. It can also now record conversations from about 25 feet away (as opposed to 12). And if you want to record a phone conversation, the device clings magnetically to the back of your smartphone. On the old model, there was a switch to toggle from normal to phone mode, but it was impossible to remember which way the switch needed to be. The Plaud Note Pro toggles automatically when it senses it’s stuck to a phone. It also records a whopping 50 hours of speech on a charge, and if you lose it, it works with the iPhone’s Find My app.
As with A.I., what is wondrous now will soon be routine. There are other Plaud-like recorders appearing, and I will be intrigued to discover what their creators have thought of to top this.
A word of warning regarding these soon-to-be-ubiquitous devices, however: they record and annotate everything. I already have some very funny bullet-point summaries of conversations between people on the bus when I failed to turn the Plaud off after a meeting. Corporate workers have reported being sent straitlaced précis of their discussions about what to have for lunch, and so on.
Someday, one of these devices is going to record a plan for a murder. Trust me, finding an inadvertent A.I. summary will be a plot twist in a movie soon.
Generic Magnetic-and-Vacuum-Suction-Cup Phone Holder
A wondrously simple phone mount that lets you focus on the road
I have rented four cars in four different countries this summer, and one element has always been an irritation: where to put my iPhone so I can follow the G.P.S.
I have a drawerful of rather clunky brackets that cling to the A/C vents and are horrible to install, but this barely matters because I often forget to bring them along.
Now there’s a new holder design appearing in floods online. All are from China, and all are more or less identical. They fold down to a disc you can fit into one hand. Some have brand names, but others do not. They are simply superb. You stick one to the windshield and then turn a knurled wheel as far as you can to reinforce the vacuum seal. Your phone then clings on magnetically regardless of what bumps you hit.
I can speak only for the unbranded one I bought through Instagram, but I strongly suspect they are all the same. Search on Amazon for “magnetic vacuum suction cup phone holder” and choose by price—perhaps not the cheapest. It’s worth buying more than one if you’re prone to mislaying things.
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer at the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology
