The scoop works, the recognition does not
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy of The Verge spent six months with Whisker's top model, the Litter-Robot 5 Pro. The machine does its core job completely: the drum rotates once the cat leaves, waste is sifted into a sealed drawer below, and the drawer is emptied about once a week. The price is 899 dollars; the same maker's Litter-Robot 4, which has no AI layer, is 699 dollars and the Evo is 599 dollars. That gap in price, plus a Whisker Plus subscription at 8 dollars a month, is exactly what pays for the two cameras, the odour sensors and the recognition features.[1]
After six months, this is what that layer produced: the WasteID system designed to tell waste types apart and cut odour did not give correct results, the two cameras could not separate a large grey-and-white tabby from a small tuxedo cat, and after a while they presented the two as the same animal. The subscription is sold on the promise of catching health problems early; the review produced not one useful alert. Seen from the street, the difference is this: the scooping runs on mechanics, while the recognition rests on a model's inference, and the two do not stand at the same level of reliability.[1]
The layer can be withdrawn
Microsoft is retiring COPILOT, the Excel function that calls AI from inside a cell, on 14 September 2026. It opened in preview in August 2025 and had been planned for general availability in 2027; it never got there. The people who could try it were Beta Channel users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence and Excel for the web users in the Frontier programme. Microsoft says it decided not to move forward with the feature, apologises for the inconvenience and notes that the same work continues in the Copilot side pane.[2]
The extreme case is Moxie. According to MIT Technology Review, the robot built to keep children company stopped talking when its maker Embodied shut down in 2024; the devices depended on outside servers, and when the company went, that link broke. Embodied's technical director Justin Beghtol published the open-source OpenMoxie with the company's permission, but the father of Xander, a ten-year-old who had bonded with his Moxie over six years, could not complete the switch and sold the robot without telling his son. The new investor who brought the robot back in 2025 also folded soon after.[3]
The constraint the three products share is this: a mechanical body, the electronics and the device's own software keep doing next year what they did on the day they were bought, while the AI layer depends on a service the maker chooses to keep running. That is why, in one product, the scooping works while the recognition falls flat; why a formula in a cell can close before its own timetable runs out; why a robot goes quiet when the servers do. Another reading is available: all three are early products and these layers may improve over time. Even so, improvement stays tied to the same decision to keep them running.[1], [2], [3]
Where should a buyer look before paying?
The practical distinction for a buyer is whether the product still works without its AI layer. With the Litter-Robot it does: the Evo at 599 dollars and the Litter-Robot 4 at 699 dollars do the same cleaning, and the price gap goes to the recognition layer. With Excel, anyone who has placed the function into their spreadsheets will have to rework the files containing it after 14 September. The question in both cases is the same: if the layer closes tomorrow, what is left, and what did that remainder cost?[1], [2]
The signal to watch on the Excel side is concrete and dated. Microsoft is pointing to the side pane instead; if no AI function that runs inside a cell is announced by the end of 2026, AI in the spreadsheet stays a chat window beside the sheet rather than a tool that goes into a formula. A user can check this in one place: whether a formula replacing COPILOT appears in Microsoft's function list.[2]
In an earlier column on the reported price range for OpenAI's home device, PicoByte argued that with a price stated but no job written down, a buyer had no decision to make. The Litter-Robot 5 Pro has both: the price is clear and the promised job is clear. The missing third piece is an independent result showing the job is actually done, and this six-month test does not supply one.[4], [1]