OKA launches a $649 AI robot lamp built for company, not assistance

A new home robot will watch you, react to music and guide a breathing session—but it won’t tell you the weather. OKA launched Mori, its mushroom-shaped AI companion lamp, on October 22, 2026. The $649 Founder’s Edition is available in a limited run of a few hundred units.

Closer to a pet than a smart speaker

Mori is the first product from One Kind Artifact, a startup based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Shenzhen, China. Its pitch, described in WIRED’s launch coverage, centers on presence rather than productivity: animated eyes follow people, its body jiggles, and it makes soft, creature-like sounds.

Unlike an Amazon Echo, Mori cannot use voice commands to control smart lights, queue Spotify tracks or answer a weather question. Touch its head, however, and it retreats into its body, becoming a colored lamp that can play nature soundscapes. Guided breathing exercises are another part of the offering.

CNET’s Mike Sorrentino saw some of that personality during a demonstration earlier this month. He described Mori cooing and acting shy after a compliment, then bopping along to a Carly Rae Jepsen song. Speaking to it felt, he wrote, like addressing a friend’s dog: responsive, but also distracted by other things.

That limited repertoire need not disqualify it as a companion, argues Chris Harrison, director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Future Interfaces Group. Asked by WIRED about Mori’s modest capabilities, he compared it with owning a goldfish or hamster: people can enjoy interacting with a pet without expecting sophisticated abilities.

All gadgets try to capture more of your attention

Hua Wang, OKA CEO, speaking to WIRED

Reading the room, without uploading it

OKA says multiple language models running locally help Mori interpret camera and microphone input and decide when to engage. The company says it can recognize a phone call or an argument and stay quiet. It also describes memory that makes Mori behave differently around familiar people and guests, forgetting someone after a month without seeing them.

Those interactions depend on sensing the home. Wang says raw images and audio are processed on the device and then discarded. Facial-feature data used to recognize people is encrypted locally and never uploaded. He says the Wi-Fi connection is used only for firmware updates.

There are also physical ways to stop the sensing: the camera turns off when Mori retracts into lamp mode, and a double-tap on its head switches off the microphone. The battery-powered device can move between rooms with its owner or remain plugged in.

The price of a quieter companion

The $649 Founder’s Edition includes a two-year warranty and two years of subscription service, according to WIRED. Breathing exercises remain free without a subscription, but nature soundscapes require one. That makes an ongoing payment part of the relaxation offering, not a charge for conventional assistant functions.

Pricing beyond the initial batch is less clear. WIRED lists a $799 standard edition without subscription features included. CNET identifies $799 as the next preorder price and $849 as the eventual standard price, and describes two subscription years as bundled. The two accounts differ on both the later price and the subscription bundle.

CNET puts the subscription after the bundled period at $17 monthly or $80 annually. Wang has floated future connections to Oura Ring data and Spotify, plus voice commands for nature sounds. Those are possibilities, not launch features: Mori arrives as a deliberately limited companion rather than a broader home assistant.