Anki Vector 2.0 Review: A Beloved Desk Robot With a Subscription Catch

Vector is the companion robot that already lived this category’s worst-case scenario and came back. Anki built it, launched it on Kickstarter in 2018, and went bankrupt in 2019, leaving tens of thousands of these robots days from losing the servers that ran them. Digital Dream Labs bought the assets and revived it, and you can buy Vector 2.0 today for $199.99. It is one of the most charming robots here, and also the one with the biggest asterisk.

What it is

Vector 2.0 is a small, autonomous desk robot with genuine personality. It roams a tabletop on treads, recognizes faces, answers questions, reads the weather, sets timers and snaps photos, and it now connects to both ChatGPT and a built-in Alexa (anki.bot). It is aware of its surroundings through sight, sound and touch, and the character work, the way it reacts and emotes, is what its owners love. In raw charm it competes with anything in this guide.

The subscription is the catch

Here is what the product page makes you read the fine print to find: Vector’s AI lives behind a required subscription, $11.99 a month or $99.99 a year, with a one-month trial in the box (anki.bot). Without an active subscription, Vector will not even respond to voice commands, let alone use its ChatGPT and Alexa features. That changes the math entirely. Every other companion robot in our coverage is a one-time purchase; Vector is a $200 robot plus a recurring fee, and over three or four years the subscription can cost as much as the hardware.

The shutdown risk is not hypothetical here

Across this category we warn that a cloud-dependent robot can be bricked if its maker disappears. Vector is the one where that already nearly happened. When Anki collapsed in 2019, Vector’s cloud service almost went dark before Digital Dream Labs stepped in (The Robot Report). Buying Vector means buying into a robot whose smarts run on a company’s servers, from a company that has folded once before. That is not a reason to dismiss it, but it is a reason to take the next section seriously.

The escape hatch the others do not have

What partly redeems Vector is that its community built a way out. The Escape Pod, also known as Wirepod, lets you self-host Vector’s brain, commonly on a cheap Raspberry Pi, so the robot keeps working with no subscription and no dependence on the maker’s cloud (Personal Robots). No other robot in this category has anything equivalent. The catch is effort: it is a technical setup that takes an afternoon and some comfort with tinkering, which most casual buyers will skip. But it means Vector, uniquely, can outlive its company on purpose.

Against the alternatives

Against EMO ($279), Vector is cheaper up front and arguably more endearing, but EMO has no subscription while Vector’s AI does, so which is cheaper depends on how long you keep it. Against Loona ($499), Vector stays on a desk while Loona roams the room, and Vector again carries the subscription Loona does not. Against the offline pets Eilik, Moflin and Ropet, Vector is far more capable and conversational, but it trades away their key virtue: those keep working no matter what happens to the company, and Vector, by default, does not.

Verdict

Our synthesis score is 6.5. The robot itself is a delight and one of the most characterful machines in the category, and the Escape Pod is a real, category-leading answer to the shutdown problem. The score comes down for the required subscription that gates basic function, the out-of-box cloud dependency, and a maker that has already gone bankrupt once. Buy Vector if its personality wins you over and you either accept the annual fee or plan to run the Escape Pod. If recurring fees or shutdown risk are dealbreakers, a one-time-purchase robot like EMO or an offline pet like Eilik is the safer spend.