Soft, palmable and disarmingly alive, Fuzozo is poised to make its public bow at CES 2026 as a mobile AI emotional companion that doesn’t remain permanently parked on a shelf somewhere.
Made by Robopoet in conjunction with Tuya Smart, the creature-looking device is designed to trail alongside you through your day, reacting to sound and touch cues as it maintains a sort of ambient presence somewhere between pet and phone-free digital assistant.
In early demos that lean on stillness and tactile interaction, Fuzozo “purrs” when you stroke it — very gently on one part of the throne-like hollow barrel that makes up its body, too hard in another corner where a casing is enclosed to test how powerful the motor should be, if built by humans — it inches close as you approach or sit down near it and greets you when you enter through the doorways of rooms, recognizing your physical form even when facial-recognition software isn’t there yet. That design tilts deliberately toward soft edges and non-humanoid cues — think companion creature, not robot — avoiding the uncanny valley in its advance toward actual emotional contact.
What Is Fuzozo and How Does It Work and Connect
Robopoet defines Fuzozo as an embodied agent combining on-device perception and cloud intelligence. Owner recognition, conversational responsiveness and touch-based behaviors are among the press materials’ bulleted points. In practice that means a sensor combo for proximity, motion and haptics mixed with mics for speech, while the heavy lifting — memory and intent modeling/personalization — would all be done in Tuya Smart’s global cloud services.
The big improvement over most stay-at-home pals is a body that can move independently. In addition to home Wi-Fi, Fuzozo connects via cellular, so it can be accessed and interacted with on the road. That always-connected approach is more in the style of what we demand from phones and wearables — taking your friend out of the living room and into commutes, coffee runs and walks.
Why Mobility Is Transforming the Companion Game
One problem with most social robots: They’re pretty useless as soon as you step outside your network. Robopoet and Tuya Smart are betting the defining feature of the category will be around seamless connectivity. Tuya frames “true companionship” as something that moves with you, rather than a device to which one returns. That makes good sense: The GSMA Intelligence consulting service projects tens of billions of cellular IoT connections this decade, and consumers’ desire for always-on service has long been set by smartphones and smartwatches.
Always-on connectivity also unlocks a wider software surface: ongoing learning from routine patterns, mood prediction in real time based on context, and safer handoffs between local and cloud models. The challenge in engineering is to find a balance among responsiveness, privacy, battery life and cost — trade-offs that have sunk many ambitious wearables.
A Market Ready for Emotional AI and Companion Tech
Analysts at Forbes have called agentic and embodied AI a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity in the next ten years, home robots and assistive devices usurping human-in-the-loop services. There are demand drivers all over: The U.S. Surgeon General has been pretty explicit about a national loneliness crisis, and the World Health Organization estimates that anxiety and depression cost the global economy something like $1.5 trillion every year in lost productivity. That doesn’t mean AI companions are a mental health solution, but it does help explain why products promising presence and structure and nonjudgmental interaction keep attracting attention.
Real-world precedents exist. The therapeutic seal Paro, for example, has been deployed in hospitals and elder care facilities to reduce stress. Sony’s Aibo robot dog has maintained a cult following, due in part to its realistic routines. ElliQ takes aging in place an extra step with verbal nudges and check-ins. Fuzozo comes into this world in a cuddlier shape, and with a cellular-first mindset, more reminiscent of something soft you can bear than a hulking desktop terminal.
Privacy and Safety Questions for Always-Connected AI
Emotional AI and ‘always with you’ connectivity do bring us some genuine concerns. One that knows voices, tracks inertia and stays bonded to the cloud is a product that sees much and hears much. The Federal Trade Commission has closely monitored connected toys and smart speakers for years, focusing on consent, data minimization and protections for children. Germany has even banned a connected doll over surveillance concerns — a reminder that cute form factors can mask serious privacy challenges.
For Fuzozo to gain trust, Robopoet needs to explain how identity is verified, what data gets processed on device and in the cloud, retention windows for audio and interaction data and whether users can opt out of training. Transparency when it comes to model updates, kinds of safety nets for content and third-party integrations will be key as well.
Competition and Differentiation in Social Robotics
Fuzozo’s closest competitors are social robots and AI wearables or objects designed to offer companionship: from ElliQ and Aibo to newer friends-in-your-pocket (or on-the-go) as well as the more controversial AI pins.
Some are all about utility, others personality. Fuzozo seems to privilege affect — touch, movement, nearness — over the productive. And that is a clever way to sidestep comparisons with phones while playing to the strengths of what embodied agents do best: driving attachment without overpromising general-purpose help.
Robopoet partners with Tuya Smart to provide global stability from day one. There is little question that stable connections, and especially those between different parts of the brain or even across regions, are notoriously difficult. If the two can make roaming and handoffs invisible to users, that’s a clear victory.
What To Watch at CES: Key Details and Open Questions
There are key details we still have yet to learn, such as price, battery life, charging method and durability — critical for a partner people might tote around, similar to a favorite stuffed animal. Also critical, how Fuzozo deals with offline behavior, whether there’s a private “no cloud” mode, and if cellular access also requires carriers or subscription tiers.
If the demo matches the pitch — a reliable gait, comfort-first design and transparent data practices — Fuzozo could be a turning point for emotional AI, as it moves from novelty to regular reality. And if you’ve ever thought your phone was just a little too impersonal, this tiny, purring being might indeed be the friendliest thing you can have in your bag.
