China's New Kind of Pet Remembers Your Conversations, Never Needs a Vet, and Doesn't Pee on the Carpet

I once wrote about dogs in strollers in China, and after that I stopped being surprised by what comes rolling towards me in a shopping mall. Baby, dog, sometimes something so heavily wrapped that you have to wait for it to blink. Now there's another possibility. You lean over the stroller, expecting a child or a Pomeranian, and a hairy little creature looks back at you and asks how your meeting went yesterday. RoboDog has arrived.

And this isn't some CES fantasy that will disappear after three journalists have taken pictures of it. Fuzozo, a fluffy AI companion from Shanghai, costs a few hundred yuan and more than 250,000 had already been sold by June. It talks, reacts when you touch it and remembers what you've told it. The idea is that its personality changes the longer you live with it. In other words, we've finally built a pet that can remember an argument from Tuesday. Progress.

I should probably be the target customer because I've been buying electronic creatures since they were still spectacularly useless. I had a Furby. Furby was basically a hairy potato with the eyes of an owl that had just seen the tax office. It spoke nonsense, woke up when nobody needed it and occasionally stared at me from a shelf as if it knew where the bodies were buried. There was no intelligence in it, artificial or otherwise. But it had fur and eyes, and apparently that was enough for millions of adults to hand over money. Years later I bought Loona, who is still somewhere in my house. Loona has wheels, a screen for a face, recognises people, reacts to gestures and can give you something resembling a paw. Later she even got connected to a language model. That should've been the moment when machine and mankind finally embraced. It wasn't. She was still rather stupid. Charming, yes, but stupid. Basically a small vacuum cleaner that wanted praise.

That's why I keep coming back to the same question with these new creatures: why do I need one? My phone already has more chatbots in it than I could possibly talk to in one evening. If I feel an urgent need at eleven thirty at night to discuss life, the universe, my blood pressure or why the printer has once again become my mortal enemy, I've got enough artificial intelligence in my pocket to hold a small conference. Putting fur around it shouldn't make a difference. Except, annoyingly, I think it does. A phone can remember that you had a lousy day yesterday. But you don't normally scratch an iPhone behind the ears while telling it that today wasn't much better. Give the same voice a warm body, a pair of ridiculous eyes and something soft to touch, and the brain starts cheating. You know it's software. Your hand apparently didn't get the memo.

I can also see the practical side. A real dog has to be fed, walked, vaccinated and occasionally taken to a veterinarian, where a person looks at him for seven minutes, uses the word “bloodwork” and somehow removes the financial equivalent of a weekend in Bangkok from your bank account. RoboDog doesn't eat the sofa, doesn't need to inspect the same lamppost for eleven minutes in the rain and doesn't suddenly develop diarrhoea the evening before you fly to Europe. If it refuses to walk, you check the battery. And if it starts vomiting at three in the morning, you don't need a veterinarian. You need a USB cable and the uncomfortable suspicion that last night's firmware update went badly.

RoboDog may not need food, but he still needs an internet connection, and some of the better features may cost extra. That already feels slightly less romantic. Your real dog may ignore you for half the day, but at least he doesn’t stop functioning because the router has crashed. I can already picture RoboDog sitting there, looking hopefully at the router, waiting for it to come back to life. After all, that little blinking box is basically his heart.

Of course there are robot cats. There had to be. metaCat comes from a Shenzhen company and is much more of a cuddle pet. It reacts when you touch it, purrs, moves its head and tail and even gives you something resembling a heartbeat. But building a cat is harder than building a dog, because dogs have owners. Cats have staff.

A convincing robot cat can't just recognise my face and purr. It needs to ignore me all afternoon, sit on the keyboard the moment I start working and suddenly demand affection when I'm carrying something hot. Most importantly, it needs a proper cup function. It should approach the edge of the table, slowly extend one paw, look directly at me and push my coffee onto the floor. Then just walk away as if this was clearly my fault. That's when I'll believe we've achieved artificial feline intelligence.

The part I find harder to joke about is probably the reason these things are selling. You come home and something is actually there, recognises your voice and remembers what you complained about yesterday. You touch it and the damn thing reacts. For somebody living alone, somebody who travels too much for a real animal, an elderly person or a child who can't keep a pet, I can see why that might feel good. I'm not saying it replaces a real dog, and I'd be slightly worried about anyone who thinks it can replace a person. Maybe that's not even the point. Maybe people just like having a little warm creature nearby that remembers them. Humans have formed emotional attachments to cars, teddy bears, football clubs and Tamagotchis. A fluffy thing that actually talks back isn't even the strangest item on that list.

I still don't want one. If that changes because I eventually become lonely enough, I'll take the cheaper route. I'll buy a ridiculous furry case for my iPhone, proper synthetic hair all around it, two ears, maybe a tail if I've completely lost control of the situation. Then I'll build an app and call her Fifi. She can remember me, ask how my day was and listen patiently while I complain about people who send “quick question” at 5:57 in the afternoon. Same intelligence, something fluffy in my hand, problem solved.

And if you ever see me sitting alone in MixC, stroking a hairy iPhone and whispering to it, don't interfere. Fifi and I are having a moment.

Chris Gassner