# Home robots should start with forgiving tasks

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/home-robots-should-start-with-forgiving-tasks/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Kyle Vogt](https://realalpha.app/builders/kyle-vogt/) · Kyle Vogt is CEO of the Bot Company. · Co-founded Cruise, a self-driving car company GM acquired, and now leads The Bot Company's household robots.
- Host: [Jack Altman](https://realalpha.app/people/jack-altman/) · General partner, Benchmark · Co-founded Lattice and ran it until 2023, then started his fund, Alt Capital.
- Show: Uncapped
- Episode: [The Breakthrough For Home Robots with Kyle Vogt, CEO of the Bot Company | Ep. 32](https://realalpha.app/v/XQoFbvyWEy8/), Nov 12, 2025
- Moment: 27:19 to 31:36 of the episode (4 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/home-robots-should-start-with-forgiving-tasks/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/XQoFbvyWEy8/?t=1639

## Quote

> “like maybe **one nine is fine** for that particular task.”
> — [Kyle Vogt](https://realalpha.app/builders/kyle-vogt/) at [28:34](https://realalpha.app/v/XQoFbvyWEy8/?t=1714) · Uncapped

## Takeaways

1. Toy pickup can be useful without perfect reliability.
2. Fragile objects need far more reliable handling.
3. Start with forgiving jobs, then move toward cooking and laundry.

## About this segment

Kyle Vogt ranks household tasks by technical difficulty and how much failure people will tolerate, contrasting toys with fragile wine glasses. He says robots could cook a steak in under five years.

From “The Breakthrough For Home Robots with Kyle Vogt, CEO of the Bot Company | Ep. 32”, Nov 12, 2025. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/XQoFbvyWEy8/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[27:24](https://realalpha.app/v/XQoFbvyWEy8/?t=1644) for the company and it's got to be aligned with that you know whatever the constraints are what do you think you can do in a home first rely like what do you think will be the first activity that can like really be done well in a home and then like what are the things that you think are close to maybe follow in the you know next 12 to 24 months or something yeah i mean there are hierarchies I think, of tasks for a home robot. And if you look at, I think, two, like a classic two by two grid, I guess one is maybe the technical complexity of the task, like how hard is it to get a robot to do this successfully? And then the second is like, what is the success rate that is acceptable to a customer of a product like this? And I'll give you an example. If you are You know, in the easy side of things from the technical capability, and also the very forgiving side of things in terms of success rate is probably like picking up your kids toys. So I have, you know, two kids, a one year old and a seven year old, and they're between the two of them are constantly making messes and toys are all over the house, running around picking up toys. And so if you have a product that you can buy, you can go to the store, buy this thing, put it in your house, push a button, turn it on. And then when you're gone for the day, all the toys are magically put away by the time you get home. It's like a mind blowing experience.

[28:29](https://realalpha.app/v/XQoFbvyWEy8/?t=1709) And let's say it screws up and like two out of the hundred toys are still on the floor when you get home. That's okay. Doesn't skip a beat. Yeah. So that, so that like, you know, think about nines of reliability for, for engineering, like maybe one nine is fine for that particular task. There are other things like putting a wine glass in a dishwasher where the technical complexity is a little higher in the, the, um.

[28:50](https://realalpha.app/v/XQoFbvyWEy8/?t=1730) What's hard about that, by the way, is it like the grabbing or is it? Yeah. So if you think about picking up objects, this microphone, which is going to make a noise when I squish it is, uh, is, is compliance. And so if I'm off a little bit on where I grip it or like how much I squeeze it, I'm not going to shatter this microphone into a million pieces for wine glass. The margin is, is very thin. And so from a dexterity standpoint, it's a little more fragile. Actually, sometimes I think about that's like a good example of a thing where I'm like, it's amazing that people can do certain things like squeeze a wine glass, the right amount or like hit, you know, a ball, you know, with a racket or a golf club with the right angle or something like that, or like catch something that's flying while you're moving. Like it's

[29:27](https://realalpha.app/v/XQoFbvyWEy8/?t=1767) actually pretty crazy what you can do like mechanically it is and the evolution to how we get there is interesting too because my one-year-old daughter her hands are like open closed there's nothing in between yeah she grabs objects the wine glass is shattered and at some point along the way we developed much more nuanced skills and abilities but so wine glass is another one the other thing is challenging is if you're putting a wine glass on a rack and you know it's a thin stem or something and you nick uh you like bump into something you might break the stem off right and so not only is it more difficult from a technical standpoint but if you shatter a wine glass in someone's dishwasher they're probably not going to be your customer anymore that's right and so that's like maybe several nines of reliability and so i think that this this sort

[30:04](https://realalpha.app/v/XQoFbvyWEy8/?t=1804) of spectrum of technical difficulty and uh basically forgivability is going to dictate the types of things you see home robots do first and um and i think we'll work our way up towards you know i think the holy grail of a home robot which is like dishes laundry end to end maybe cooking these things all of them have like all of these little uh it's like a minefield you do one thing wrong and you ruin the whole process like for laundry if you put the red sock in with the whites you know have pink laundry that's like game over right and it's you know so there's things like that for cooking it's the same thing you put too much salt or pepper in there and the dish is ruined you know so these are things that i think we'll get to and i think it'll happen pretty quick but you know i think you think it's like cooking a steak at some point yeah why not

[30:45](https://realalpha.app/v/XQoFbvyWEy8/?t=1845) if you think about at the end of the day you've you have pick in place and simple manipulation that's what cooking is yeah they're just like a much higher degree of reliability and there's other things around food safety and bacteria and other things that come in cookie cooking and temperature sensing and what like that so it's all doable it's just like i think at some point it's like hey robot i'm at work right now there's a steak in the fridge please cook it and clean up everything by the time like 15 years from now that's that's doable less than five less than five yeah this stuff is going fast again if you saw if you look at the robots you can buy today day in the world, like the nice robot vacuums, you may not think that. If you see what's happening behind closed doors at the best robotics companies in the world, you might think that. And if you're

[31:26](https://realalpha.app/v/XQoFbvyWEy8/?t=1886) the leadership of these companies, the technical leadership, and you kind of know where things are going, you absolutely believe that. The hand seems really, as we're talking about this,