Deebot X1 Omni Is a Great Robot Vacuum, but It's Still Not a Human

The Ecovacs Deebot X1 Omni is an impressive-looking robot vacuum that shows it means business when it comes to your floors. The vacuum itself is outfitted with all kinds of sensors and cameras, while the docking station is vast and towering. Aside from its looks, the unit can empty dirt and dirty water and refill itself at its cleaning station, so human intervention is kept at a minimum. In terms of features and tricks, this is the all-in-one vacuum and mop that should be able to do it all—and mostly do it by itself.

I've used several robot vacuums over the years, but I've never been impressed by any of them. It's probably because most of them have been value-priced and very simple, so they required a lot of intervention and moving of objects before they could bounce around the room. Still, I've held out hope that these types of devices would improve dramatically. Maybe you've felt the same?

After getting a new dog, I decided to jump back into this category of products for the singular reason of being unable to keep up with constant cleaning of pet hair on the floor. The Deebot X1 Omni costs over $1,500, so I went in with very high expectations and little room for disappointment: It promises automated cleaning, and that's what I wanted it to do. And, to my surprise, it (mostly) delivers.

TL;DR

Pros:

• Impressive room mapping and obstacle avoidance
• The docking station has an attractive design
• Did a respectable job vacuuming and mopping

Cons:

• The docking station is quite large
• The voice assistant got triggered without calling it

Buy at Ecovacs.

Features of the Deebot X1 Omni

There are a lot of features baked into the X1 Omni and its docking station, but I think obstacle avoidance was my top concern. I didn't want this to be a dishwasher situation where I am needing to prewash dishes for a machine whose job that supposedly is.

Thankfully, I was constantly surprised by the X1 Omni's ability to pause for a moment to decide to maneuver around all kinds of objects. It handles this utilizing its camera vision to see and identify common household items, and its laser scanning to visualize a 3D scan of what's in front of it.

Even with this computer vision, the other half of the equation means processing the information it sees. The X1 OMNI has an AI processor that's 16 times faster than the previous model and 20 times faster at actually recognizing objects. Ecovacs says this product will be able to "avoid eight types of common floor objects with a success rate of 95 percent."

I found these claims around the X1 OMNI's recognition ability to be true and generally good, but it's not perfect. A half-inch stone lip in front of my living room fireplace, for example, consumed much of the vacuum's time and attention early on, until I told it not to go there–from within the Ecovacs Home mobile app.

The other features I think are key are the auto-cleaning and -emptying enabled by the Omni Station. This is the docking station where the robot charges itself, but it's also where it empties dust, gets rid of dirty water and replenishes with clean water. The dock will also clean and dry the mops. To do this, the Omni Station houses 4-liter clean and dirty water tanks along with a 3-liter disposable dust bag.

Having the Omni Station do all the things it does is a big part of the robot cleaning experience. Not only do I not want to vacuum regularly, but I also don't want to fuss with cleaning a dirty vacuum regularly, either. In my time testing this vacuum, the docking station didn't introduce any additional complications to the overall experience. It handled itself with poise, only needing fresh clean water and the removal of dirty water.

The downside of the Omni Station? It's big. All of its water tanks and its dust bag are hidden inside, out of sight, so it looks sleek but it's physically large. It might be a challenge to fit it in any location around the house, but luckily it doesn't look unsightly.

Cleaning Performance

The Deebot X1 Omni doesn't have the object dodging skills of a human, and it doesn't have the cleaning skills of one, either. Still, much like its avoidance of objects is good enough most of the time, so is its cleaning performance.

My new dog's shedding was the catalyst for wanting (and needing) daily vacuuming and mopping. The X1 Omni takes care of those needs with flying colors. It has done a wonderful job cleaning up all the pet hair, and it no longer feels like it's covering the floor all the time.

The X1 Omni is definitely cleaning the floors with its mopping function because the dirty water tank is, well, dirty. It's not removing the scuff marks on our hardwood floors made by our dining room table chairs, but I wasn't expecting it to. It did achieve what I was hoping for: to clean drips of fruit juice and other types of light stains the vacuum isn't equipped to do.

I wouldn't have thought we needed regular mopping, but I have seen a clear improvement in the look of our floors. I never noticed any puddles of water or anything out of the ordinary. Only a thin shine from scrubbing with water that dried quickly.

Mobile App and Mapping

The reason robot vacuums of this caliber (and premium price point) are so impressive is because of their mapping abilities, which are enabled by the different types of cameras on board. Again, the X1 Omni managed to move around my house and avoid objects with relative ease. The next level in making your vacuum feel at home is tweaking its created maps to add furniture and off-limit zones.

All of this functionality is done within the mobile app. The company manages to cram a lot of capabilities into a usable interface, but the amount means that simplicity is secondary. It took me multiple days to really dial in how I wanted the vacuum to clean. It mostly took so long because I kept discovering I could better define cleaning areas to control where I wanted the X1 Omni to go.

I spent longer than I wanted to, tweaking the settings and zones, but I was eventually able to get the vacuum to do exactly what I wanted: to clean all the hardwood first as well as skip a couple of areas it had trouble dealing with. My biggest qualm was that the mobile app is a bit cluttered and more difficult to work with than it needs to be. I recently used a similar Roborock vacuum and found its app to offer just as much functionality in an easier to use format.

I doubt many people are using their vacuum to spy on other parts of their home, but it should be noted that ability is available. Within the Ecovacs Home mobile app you can remotely view what the onboard camera sees. You can snap pictures, record video, do voice calls and even set it to patrol your home. Using your vacuum as a security system seems hacky to me, but if you need another feature to justify the large purchase, maybe this is it?

OK Yiko

Yiko is the name of the voice assistant built into the vacuum. It's best and worst feature is that it's very responsive—too responsive in my opinion. At least once a day, the female voice could be heard speaking from its corner of the house saying that it didn't understand and then going through a list of commands that you could use. The problem is that no one was trying to engage the vacuum or any of its functions. It was simply getting triggered on its own, for no clear reason.

In theory, I really like having a voice assistant on board the vacuum and not needing to rely on a third-party speaker or your mobile phone—like Siri or Alexa. But Yiko's false positives quickly became annoying. Almost to the point of forgoing the useful voice commands and turning them off altogether.

When I purposefully did use the voice commands, they worked really well. Also, I often found that the basic commands, like "Clean the living room" or "Return to base," were much faster to say directly to the vacuum than using the app. I'm not sure if this is an area the company could improve through software updates, but eliminating even half the false-positive triggers I experienced would be a huge benefit.

Battery Life and Miscellaneous Notes

Cleaning was always efficient, which is good for battery life. It takes the X1 Omni about 35 to 40 minutes to do three large rooms downstairs. I often noticed the remaining battery life of the vacuum to be around 85 percent after it was finished with that. The battery was never the reason for the vacuum to interrupt its cleaning. It only needed to temporarily return to its station to refill its water.

The vacuum itself is loud enough to hear throughout the house. Even on its lowest suction setting, it's clearly audible. My dog was able to sleep through its cleaning, however, even as it passed his kennel. I suspect a sleeping baby in another room would do fine with its white-noise-like sound, too. The 10 seconds it takes to empty the dust from the vacuum to the Omni Station, however, are really loud and will certainly wake someone up.

Even after more than 10 days, I didn't notice any smell coming from the dirty water tank in the docking station. I've heard this can be an issue for these all-in-one cleaning stations, but I didn't experience that in my initial testing. Even though I don't want to fuss with regular maintenance of vacuums, I'm willing to empty dirty water every other week.

Should You Buy the Deebot X1 Omni?

On its own, as a vacuum, the Deebot X1 Omni is a brilliant product that has been able to give me a new outlook on robot vacuums as a whole. I think it works well, and its Omni Station, although big, is elegant and a key piece of why it's so great. There are a couple of aspects, however, that give me pause.

I wish the mobile app was a little more refined, with an eye on simplicity, so that it doesn't feel like you need to be an advanced user to operate it. I also think people will become annoyed with the voice assistant thinking you're trying to speak to it when you're not. Lastly, spending just over $1,500 on a vacuum that may still not satisfy every cleaning scenario is a tall order.

If those concerns don't press on any of your pain points, then jump in with the Deebot X1 Omni. I think you'll love it. But, if any of those items don't work, you'll likely need to wait a couple of years until this cleaning technology trickles down to the lower-priced robot vacuums.

Buy at Ecovacs for $1,549.

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