Whisker’s AI-powered litter robot thinks my cats swapped bodies

The greatest invention in pet tech in recent years is the litter robot. A machine that scoops your kitties’ poop so you don’t have to — what else could a cat owner possibly want? How about insights into your kitty’s litter box usage that could flag health issues? Sign me up. But I have two feline friends… No worries, kitty facial recognition can handle that.

At least, that is the idea behind the Litter-Robot 5 Pro, the highest-end model from the OG robotic pooper scooper company Whisker. Boasting a dual camera system and an array of sensors to literally sniff out your cat’s deposits, all wrapped up with AI algorithms and machine learning, the 5 Pro promises to not only deal with my boys’ bathroom habits but also accurately monitor and track them. It failed.

I spent six months testing the $899 Litter-Robot 5 Pro, alongside its budget counterpart, the $599 Litter-Robot Evo, both of which launched late last year. These ingenious devices work using sensors and motors. The cat goes into the large globe lined with litter; the sensors register him while he does his thing, and once he’s left, the robot rotates the drum to filter and sift the waste into the sealed bin below.

This takes away a yucky daily chore; you only have to empty the drawer about once a week, and it hides the gross litter box itself from view, while containing most of the smell. A fully featured app gives you remote control of most of the device’s functions; you can also check the waste and litter levels and see your kitty’s weight thanks to an onboard scale. A litter robot is a great gadget if you travel a lot, as it leaves your kitty with a cleaner place to go during his abandonment.

Whisker currently has four models: the Litter-Robot Evo, the Litter-Robot 4, the Litter-Robot 5, and the 5 Pro. They all work this same way to “scoop.” Today, I wouldn’t recommend paying the premium for the 5 Pro’s AI features — because they just don’t work. I was also disappointed in the tradeoffs that come with the Evo compared to the Litter-Robot 4.

There’s no litter-level monitoring on the Evo, so the app doesn’t alert you when it’s low; it supports fewer and smaller cats, has a smaller bin, and no night light. It also doesn’t work with the litter hopper accessory Whisker sells.

While the Evo’s footprint is better for tight spaces, its build quality didn’t feel as sturdy, and its waste drawer is finicky and doesn’t always shut properly. I do like that it has an LCD screen to tell you what it’s doing, as does the 5 Pro. These are both better solutions than the confusing LED indicator lights on the LR4.

As a pooper-scooper, the Litter-Robot 5 Pro dispatches waste superbly. Its bigger bin, more intuitive controls — including that LCD screen — and larger dome make it a better robot overall than its predecessor, the $699 Litter-Robot 4. But the smarts are seriously lacking.

I have a middle-aged fur baby, and the appeal of this significantly more expensive device was the promise it could keep him healthier for longer by catching possible issues earlier. Thankfully, Smokey is currently fit as a fiddle, but in my time using the 5 Pro, its $8-a-month Whisker Plus subscription that covers its AI health features and video storage didn’t deliver one actionable or useful insight.

Its new WasteID system, which purportedly can tell the difference between #1 and #2 and dispatch the latter faster to reduce odors, repeatedly failed to accurately identify waste, and its two new cameras couldn’t tell my large gray and white tabby from my small, sleek tuxedo kitty, getting confused between them and eventually merging them into two identical cats.

I was also disappointed that I couldn’t use the camera to watch my kitty poop. Yes, I’m weird, but I’m also not alone — the Litter-Robot 4 has a camera mount accessory for exactly this reason! Getting an inside look at what’s happening in the litter tray before the results are whisked away is valuable data for many cat parents.

While the front-facing camera records visits, the interior cameras only allow a live view; catching a cat in the act is very hard (I only managed it once). The advertising for the product implies you’ll get recordings from both, but even with the monthly subscription, only the front-facing camera, which catches the kitty coming in, records anything. Whisker tells me the poop-view is coming soon.

The camera wasn’t totally useless; I did appreciate being able to remotely check in and make sure there wasn’t a kitty trapped in the litter box if I received a “cycle interrupted” or an obstruction detected alert, features that stop the globe rotating if there’s any activity detected while the machine is rotating.

Just be very careful where you place the litter robot. It took me about a week to realize that where I had put mine, the front-facing camera not only caught my kitties’ bathroom trips, but also those of anyone who used the powder room across the hall. There is an option to turn on recording only when a cat is spotted, but — as many cat parents will know — feline friends like to accompany their owners into the bathroom!

For me, the 5 Pro’s biggest letdown was the kitty facial recognition feature, called Cat ID. The front-facing camera is supposed to recognize which cat is entering and then assign any business to that cat in the app’s history section. It can apparently keep track of up to five cats, but it struggled mightily with my two who don’t look a lick alike.

After a week or so of use, the app presents a PawPrint setup option, Whisker’s name for facial recognition, where it shows you images the camera has captured of your cats, and you pick the two best — mine were all fairly bad. Whisker does sell a $29 RFID PetTag to help with cats that look similar; my cats don’t wear collars, but a $900 machine advertising facial recognition shouldn’t need a wearable to tell two different-looking cats apart.

According to Whisker, things like poor lighting and bad initial imaging can throw the camera off, and when it’s not sure, it will use other signals, such as its onboard scale, to guess. All this is apparently why my 13.4-pound Smokey lost 2 pounds overnight, with his weight recorded as Boone’s when the robot mistook his scrawny younger brother for him.

The robot didn’t correct itself either, and a week later both cats were still registering as the same weight. I knew this was an error, but false information can lead to false conclusions, and a robot guessing my cat’s weight is not helpful.

Getting things back on track — resetting the weights in each cat’s profile, reassigning incorrect visits, correcting video logs — was a lot of work to help this nearly $1,000 machine do its job. And the camera still doesn’t correctly recognize either cat. Whisker says the system is built to learn, so it should get better. The company also told me that they have “improved the enrollment process so it’s more selective about the images it uses for facial recognition.”

Then there’s the health monitoring. Beyond assigning the cats the wrong weight, WasteID consistently failed to recognize the type of waste and often couldn’t provide the weight of each deposit.

Whisker says my unit’s feces-sensing gas sensor was off, something they were able to correct it remotely. When that didn’t improve things they determined that my unit’s scale was off, which possibly contributed to both the WasteID and the PawPrint issues. That would require a whole new machine to fix.

The good news: The company recently rolled out a new feature called Patterns that goes some way toward the actionable insights I was looking for. It summarizes each cat’s day: “Yesterday Smokey weighed 12.52 lbs, visited the Litter Robot 1 times and spent .9 minutes in total, everything in range” (The robot still thinks he’s lighter than he is; I wish my bathroom scale did that). But there are still no details here about waste type.

Patterns, along with several other updates to improve the core features, have arrived several months after the product launched — which means 5 Pro owners have been paying $8 a month for features that didn’t work.

While the AI features are clearly still a work in progress, the Litter Robot 5 Pro does its main job very well. My litter robot experience is limited to this brand, having tested the LR4 before, but I would never go back to life with a manual litter box. Instead of scooping twice a day, I just empty once a week.

My cats also both took to it immediately; Smokey jumped right in and did his business, and Boone followed suit. He’s younger, however, and does love to play with it. I’ve caught him waiting for it to cycle, then batting at the inside to throw it off. He also shredded the optional litter mat accessory within a week.

The Litter Robot is amazingly quiet, so much so that I tested the Evo in my daughter’s room, and she said it never woke her up once because of noise or smell. The 5 Pro, however, is bigger and much taller — taking up roughly the same room as a side table. It’s still as quiet. For both, you need an outlet nearby, but if you have the space, it will earn its spot.

AI aside, if you like the idea of having a camera as a safety feature and have a large cat (up to 30lbs) or five furry friends, the Pro 5 will serve you well. However, I suggest you save yourself $100 and go with the regular Litter Robot 5. This ditches the camera but gets you all the other features — including WasteID.

If you don’t care about the WasteID tracking and have up to four kitties, the $699 LR 4 does an excellent job without any AI at all. I’d recommend it over the cheapest model, the $599 Evo. Unless you are really tight on space, this isn’t worth the $100 savings; its build feels flimsier, and it constantly threw off errors, particularly around phantom bonnet detachments. Whisker told me this was likely a hardware error with my particular unit, so your mileage may vary.

The Litter Robot is a fantastic invention, but with the 5 Pro, Whisker has fallen into a trap I’ve seen many smart home companies stumble into; it put too much faith in AI’s potential capabilities. Once AI is out in the wild, it behaves very differently than in the lab. This is especially true in the home, where the variables are endless.

It’s possible the 5 Pro will eventually do everything it promised at launch. But as readers of The Verge know well, never buy a product based on the promised future updates. Today, the AI just isn’t ready.

Photos, video, and screenshots by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge