ECOVACS DEEBOT OZMO T8 AIVI Review: The first family-friendly robot vacuum

I love a good robot vacuum, they do a great job at keeping the floor tidy in between your big cleaning days – which get further away when the robot vacuum is doing its thing well.

But several robot vacuums have come and gone (sorry Boris) in our household for a very simple reason. We have three young kids, and they don’t clean up after themselves, and we don’t clear up their crap every day.

You see what happens is the Robot sets off to clean and get stuck on a cord, chews up an odd sock or just generally gets confused about where the hell it is because even with advanced mapping the place from 5 cm off the ground looks completely different.

Enter the Ecovacs Deebot Ozmo T8 AIVI. This Deebot takes all the goodness of previous models like great suction, mopping capabilities, voice assistant compatibility and advanced mapping – and ads a robotic eye.

Through a camera, combined with artificial intelligence based object recognition, the T8 AIVI can see things on the floor, identify them, and avoid them.

Up front, I have to tell you, it doesn’t see everything. The kids “ooshies” and some smaller lego pieces – still get swept up or dragged around. But we’ve quickly learned to restrict those to our non robot areas (the play room) or tidy those up each night.

With that done, Larry (that’s the name we’ve given our Deebot Ozmo T8) can set off and just work around the odd socks, the cable laying half on the floor and other random objects.

Plus, I’m convinced it’s also much better at navigating intricate areas. Our dining table with seven chairs is 32 legs to navigate in a small space, and while we choose to put the chairs on the table once a week for a comprehensive clean, the daily sweep is an excellent result.

Then add mopping. The standard mopping attachment is a washable cloth that when attached uses an on-board water container to wet that cloth and it’s dragged around the hard floor areas (Deebot knows Carpet vs Hard Floor) for a nice gentle mopping.

But, that too never really passed muster at our place.

Again – enter Larry. With the Ecovacs PRO Reservoir attached, a “deep scrubbing” is possible.

Using non-reusable cloth pads, the Pro attachment has built in agitators, which means Larry’s rear end is rubbing and scrubbing on the floor in a much more thorough way. And don’t remind my wife, but we haven’t hand mopped the floors in a the couple of months Larry has been at work.

I do a gentle mop every 3-4 days, and a Pro “scrub” every 7-8. The floors look excellent!

Alexa controlled, Google Controlled, ridiculously awesome mapping which means you can simply draw a line on the map to stop the robot entering an area (play room!) are just fundamentally brilliant Deebot Ozmo features that should warrant much more verbose praise from me, but just let me assure you there isn’t anything better on the market in the mapping sense.

Oh, and that camera used to identify objects. When your robot is not in use, you can open your app and send Larry out on patrol, and you can see inside your home with a Robot’s eye view.

At $1,299 it’s the most expensive Deebot. But it’s not the most expensive Robot Vacuum.

I don’t think you should spend more than this.

But I also thing the Video view feature is a gimmick not worth buying it for.

And the Artificial intelligence object recognition is exceptional, but if you don’t have kids and keep a tidy house, then you don’t need that, so a lower priced Deebot would do a great clean.