On a recent morning, I knocked on the front door of a handsome two-story home in Redwood City, Calif. Within seconds, the door was opened by a faceless robot dressed in a beige bodysuit that clung tight to its trim waist and long legs.
This svelte humanoid greeted me with what seemed to be a Scandinavian accent, and I offered to shake hands. As our palms met, it said: “I have a firm grip.”
When the home’s owner, a Norwegian engineer named Bernt Børnich, asked for some bottled water, the robot turned, walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator with one hand.
Artificial intelligence is already driving cars, writing essays and even writing computer code. Now, humanoids, machines built to look like humans and powered by A.I., are poised to move into our homes so they can help with the daily chores. Mr. Børnich is chief executive and founder of a start-up called 1X. Before the end of the year, his company hopes to put his robot, Neo, into more than 100 homes in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.
His start-up is among the dozens of companies planning to sell humanoids and get them into both homes and businesses. Investors have poured $7.2 billion into more than 50 start-ups since 2015, according to PitchBook, a research firm that tracks the tech industry. The humanoid frenzy reached a new peak last year, when investments topped $1.6 billion.
Entrepreneurs like Mr. Børnich and Mr. Musk believe humanoids will one day do much of the physical work that is now handled by people, including household chores like wiping counters and emptying dishwashers, warehouse jobs like sorting packages and factory labor like building cars on an assembly line.
Neo said “Hello” with a Scandinavian accent because it was operated by a Norwegian technician in the basement of Mr. Børnich’s home. (Ultimately, the company wants to build call centers where perhaps dozens of technicians would support robots.) The robot walked through the dining room and kitchen on its own. But the technician spoke for Neo and remotely guided its hands via a virtual reality headset and two wireless joysticks.
I first visited 1X’s offices in Silicon Valley nearly a year ago. When a robot named Eve entered the room, opening and closing the door, I could not shake the feeling that this wide-eyed robot was really a person in costume.
All of this is learned behavior. If I stepped into Neo’s path, it would stop and move around me. If I pushed its chest, it stayed on its feet. Sometimes, it stumbled or did not quite know what to do. But it could walk around a room much like people do.
What we are selling is more of a journey than a destination. It is going to be a really bumpy road, but Neo will do things that are truly useful.
When I asked Mr. Børnich how the company would handle privacy once the humanoids were inside customers’ homes, he explained that technicians, working from remote call centers, would only take control of the robot if they received approval from the owner via a smartphone app.
We want you to give us your data on your terms. Using this data, Mr. Børnich hopes to produce a humanoid that can do almost any household chore. That means Neo could potentially replace workers who make their living cleaning homes.
But that is still years away — at best. And because of growing shortage of workers who handle both house cleaning and care of elders and children, organizations that represent these workers welcome the rise of new technologies that do work in the home — provided that companies like 1X build robots that work well alongside human workers.
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