Straight answers

A few, yes. Realbotix's Aria and Melody ship today as six-figure companions, and 1X's NEO is taking orders for the home. Most of the field — Tesla's Optimus, Figure, Apptronik's Apollo — is still pre-order, pilot-only, or built for warehouses rather than living rooms.

Far more than a gadget. Realbotix Aria starts around $125,000 plus a $199.99/month AI subscription; 1X's NEO is expected near $20,000 or a monthly plan; general-purpose humanoids run from roughly $16,000 (Unitree G1) to $250,000 (Agility Digit). Then add maintenance, repairs and subscription across the machine's life.

The most lifelike ones usually can't. Aria — today's most expressive companion — rides a wheeled base with a static lower body. Reliable bipedal walking is still the hard frontier, owned by industrial humanoids like Optimus, Figure 03 and Digit, none of which is built for companionship.

Some will. Aria recognises faces and voices and keeps a conversational memory of your preferences. How much it remembers — and whether that memory lives in the cloud or on the device — depends on the AI backend each maker uses.

Convincing in stillness, far less so in motion. A still face under good silicone can pass for human; sustained, reactive expression and natural movement are where the uncanny valley still lives. We score every machine on an editorial realism index across face, skin, movement and mind.

It varies. Aria is deliberately AI-agnostic — it can run a frontier cloud model or converse entirely on-device. Others ship a proprietary stack. The model matters: it shapes memory, latency, personality, and how much of your conversation leaves the room.

Assume it's listening. A companion is an always-on array of cameras and microphones, and most makers process at least some of it in the cloud while publishing little about retention or deletion. Treat privacy as a feature to interrogate before you buy, not after.

It's a real risk with cloud-dependent hardware. If the servers go dark, subscription-gated features — conversation, memory, updates — can stop, and your data's fate depends on the maker's policy. We flag cloud dependence on every profile for exactly this reason.

Mostly, today — the consumer companion market leans heavily female-presenting, though Realbotix and others offer male and customisable options. The general-purpose humanoids like Optimus, Digit and Apollo are non-gendered industrial machines.

No. We cover companionship and intimacy frankly, as an adult-interest subject, but there is nothing sexually explicit here — it's editorial, not imagery. Mature in subject, never in content.

We report on companions; we don't sell them. Coverage is editorial and independent, and where we use an affiliate link, we say so.