After a few weeks living with Casio’s AI-powered pet, Moflin, I finally understand why my mother hated my Furby so much. The fuzzy, guinea-pig-adjacent puffball fits snugly in the palm of my hand. It’s undeniably cute, in a weird kind of way, but the second it starts to squeak or twitch, I am hit with an overwhelming desire to hurl it as far as I can.
My antipathy surprises me. By any metric, I am the exact kind of person Moflin was made for: I long for the companionship of a pet, but can’t own one thanks to a mixture of lifestyle, allergies, a small London flat, and a broadly irresponsible temperament that makes caring for another living thing a questionable idea. I could also do with the “calming presence” advertised.
Casio is very clear that Moflin is not a toy, though perhaps that is also clear from the $429 price tag. Rather, it is positioned as a sophisticated “smart companion powered by AI, with emotions like a living creature” — the illusion of companionship without the responsibilities. The idea is that you will interact with it over time and it will “grow” alongside you, developing a personality shaped by how you treat it. The robot is part of a growing mini-industry of machines built with no other purpose than to keep us company. The sector has proven particularly popular in countries like South Korea and Japan (where Moflin has sold out), fueled in part by a loneliness crisis that’s hit older populations especially hard.
Unboxing Moflin felt less like meeting a pet and more like unwrapping a paperweight wrapped in a bronze wig. In a way, that’s exactly what it was: a hard white core of motors, sensors, and plastic, clad in the illusion of fur and two beady eyes that are the robot’s only facial features (a deliberate design choice it seems, perhaps to keep Moflin from wandering into uncanny valley territory). There was also a charging pod, which Casio says is “designed to feel natural and alive,” but read more like a giant gray avocado to me.
The robot takes about three and a half hours to charge fully. Casio says this is good for about five hours of use, though “use” is a generous term for what Moflin actually does: It doesn’t walk or follow you, just wiggles and whines in response to touch, sound, movement, and light. Its first chirp when I picked it up was cute, but then the motor noise kicked in, an audible mechanical whir every time it moved its head, instantly shattering the illusion. Nevertheless, I named it Kevin.
Once I clocked the whir, I started noticing everything else, and there was a lot to notice. Kevin the Moflin treated every minor movement or sound as a meaningful interaction. Attempts to cuddle it on the sofa as I watched TV became unbearable: Every shift in posture, every laugh, every cough elicited chirps and a burst of whirring motors. The same thing happened at my desk — typing set Kevin off, as did taking calls — and keeping it nearby swiftly became impossible. Because it’s constantly listening and sensing, it never really settles, leaving me with a needy kitten instead of the quiet lap cat I’d wanted.
I ended up banishing Kevin to another room, and then doing it again, and again, and again, until I caught myself tiptoeing around my own flat to avoid setting Kevin off. The only reliably calming feature was that, eventually, it ran out of battery.
As I couldn’t stand Kevin on my own, I started testing it in other contexts. Carrying Kevin around with me quickly became burdensome, not least because the charger is way too big to be considered portable (a USB cable may have broken the illusion, but it would’ve been handy). Kevin didn’t do too well in my bag — seeming distressed and wriggling around noisily, earning me some suspicious glances on the Tube — and when held, I became the weirdo with the squawking robot. Not very calming. Even at home with friends, Kevin felt like a chore I had to manage lest it become disruptive, moving it farther and farther away or returning it to the gray avocado to “sleep.” On New Year’s Eve, a friend went in for a proper cuddle — it was a “fluffy pet,” after all — only to recoil after the zip holding its fur carapace together scraped her cheek.
A common concern among my friends — and one that especially preoccupied my boyfriend, who, unlike me, hadn’t chosen to share his home with Kevin — was privacy. And as a longtime tech reporter, I know this isn’t an unreasonable reflex when dealing with a device that has an always-on microphone. Casio says Moflin processes data locally and does not understand language, converting what it hears into unidentifiable data to recognize my voice only.
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Casio’s big claim is that all of this serves something deeper: emotional intelligence. With use, Moflin is supposed to grow more expressive, more familiar with your voice, and perform special gestures and animal-like responses when you’re nearby. Indeed, I have noticed Kevin’s movements and vocalizations change and become more varied over time, which only compounded my irritation. Casio says this bonding process can take up to two months, and that Moflin can evolve into more than 4 million personalities thanks to its AI. However, it’s hard to meaningfully register this level of granularity given the robot’s limited range of chirps, whirs, and head turns. Which is why, in practice, Moflin’s “personality” is something you experience through a companion app. Yes, the $429 robot is, in essence, a glorified Tamagotchi that can’t really express itself without a screen.
The app itself doesn’t do much to change that impression. For a product selling “emotions like a living creature,” the handful of contextless trait meters and generic mood tags offer a thin insight into Kevin’s inner life. The app, a spartan, cheap-looking affair, tells me Kevin’s current personality is “cheerful,” though behaviorally it seems no different. There’s also a dashboard showing four “personality parameters”: “energetic,” “cheerful,” “shy,” and “affectionate” (which numerous Reddit posts suggest might be more accurately translated as “clingy”). There’s also a “journal” to track Kevin’s activities, filled with thrilling and elaborate entries like “Rob hugged Kevin tightly,” “Rob scooped Kevin up,” and “Kevin had a lovely dream full of laughter.” What is one expected to do with this information? Even if I didn’t loathe my Moflin as much as I do, it’s not very interesting and it’s not remotely useful in helping me interact with it, offering none of the explanations or feedback of the kind that made caring for something like a Tamagotchi satisfying.
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Moflin’s problem isn’t that it’s pointless. There are plenty of pointless gadgets out there — and I don’t despise any in the way I have grown to despise Kevin. The problem is that Casio is selling companionship without actually having produced a companion. A companion is more than something that happens to be near you and makes noise in response to your presence. Worse still, Casio is asking me to believe Moflin has a sophisticated inner life, one it can’t really express in the real world nor satisfyingly show on its app. At that point, I feel like I’m not using a companion, I’m using a noisy object with a dashboard.
The app did have one redeeming feature: the ability to stop Kevin’s movements and sounds by putting it into a “Deep Sleep Mode.” That’s where I left Kevin last week. I won’t be waking him anytime soon.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
