Watcher XiaoZhi: the world’s first open-source physical AI agent

Have you heard of the Watcher XiaoZhi? It's the world’s first open-source physical AI agent designed to make spaces smarter, safer, and more interactive. Built on the SenseCraft AI platform and powered by LLMs like Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi, and Doubao, Watcher is a fully customisable AI companion that learns, adapts, and integrates seamlessly with your environment.

Watcher brings together vision, speech, and contextual understanding to deliver true spatial intelligence. Whether used in retail, home automation, or industrial monitoring, it provides real-time awareness and intuitive responses that evolve with every update.

Shop Now

What Is Watcher XiaoZhi?

Watcher XiaoZhi, combined with XiaoZhi AI, brings intelligence into everyday spaces. It can see, hear, and speak — using powerful LLMs to understand user intent and environment. With visual wake-up, it recognizes the user instantly and interacts naturally. As a smart space assistant, it supports reminders, manages home automation, and enables multilingual, barrier-free communication. Built on the MCP (Model Context Protocol) and an open-source ecosystem, it allows makers and developers to customize and explore unlimited possibilities.

Watcher is designed to bridge the digital and physical worlds, acting as an intelligent observer capable of responding to changing conditions and user intent in real time.

• Monitor and analyse designated spaces with precision.
• Recognise and interact with people, objects, or events through natural communication.
• Collect visual and contextual data to form actionable insights and inform decision-making.

test it out for yourself by using the seed studio watcher simulator

SenseCraft AI and MCP Integration

The Watcher XiaoZhi is built on the SenseCraft AI platform, which now supports MCP (Multi-functional Control Panel) integration. This enhancement transforms Watcher into a versatile AI companion, allowing users to extend its abilities dynamically, much like adding new features through mobile app installations.

With MCP integration, Watcher can:

• Play music and check the weather.
• Read the news or tell jokes.
• Access external APIs for live information and interactive content.
• Expand its functionality through custom plugin development.

This plugin-based framework ensures that Watcher continues to evolve, adapting to user needs with every update or new integration. It reflects a user-focused design philosophy, keeping the experience relevant, flexible, and continually improving.

Smart Home Integration and Automation

Watcher seamlessly connects with Home Assistant, allowing it to integrate naturally into any smart home ecosystem. With conversational voice commands, users can manage lighting, climate control, and IoT devices without relying on complex scripting or dedicated apps.

Highlights:

• Natural voice control for Home Assistant-connected devices.
• Real-time environmental monitoring and contextual awareness.
• Privacy-first local inference with no reliance on the cloud.
• Simple setup using the official SenseCraft integration guide.

“Tell me if someone’s wearing a mask”, and Watcher responds instantly using its onboard AI vision recognition.

Hardware Overview and Vision Capabilities

Built for real-world spatial intelligence, the Watcher XiaoZhi combines a compact, durable design with advanced AI vision capabilities. Its firmware enables object detection, recognition, and situational awareness through local neural networks optimised for TinyML efficiency, allowing responsive AI performance at the edge.

These vision-driven features allow Watcher to perceive its surroundings intelligently, detecting motion, recognising human activity, and interpreting spatial context, all while maintaining low power consumption and fast inference speed.

Key specs:

Real-World Applications

Watcher can be adapted for a wide range of use cases, bringing intelligent automation and spatial awareness to different environments. Its flexibility allows developers and users to customise functionality for retail, workplace, agricultural, or corporate applications.

Key examples include:

Retail and Customer Engagement

Acts as a shopping guide that recognises customer interest, provides product details, and generates valuable analytics to optimise store layouts and improve the retail experience.

Reception and Visitor Management

Identifies visitors, offers personalised greetings, and records visitor statistics to enhance workplace efficiency and data-driven insights.

Agricultural Monitoring

Performs time-lapse observation of crops or hives, capturing essential moments throughout growth cycles to support data-led agricultural management and yield optimisation.

Smart Conference Rooms

Monitors occupancy, automates lighting and HVAC systems, and provides summarised environmental and usage insights for efficient resource management.

“I’m Nobody, but with your imagination, you can turn me into Somebody.”

Developer Playground and Open-Source Potential

Watcher is a fully open-source platform, both in hardware and software, designed to inspire creativity and collaboration. Developers can explore its architecture, modify its language models, and experiment with new integrations through the SenseCAP Wiki and GitHub repositories. This open design transforms Watcher into a flexible foundation for custom AI development and edge intelligence projects.

It’s a true developer playground, encouraging experimentation, contribution, and shared progress across the maker community.

Resources:

• Developer Wiki
• GitHub Repository (coming soon)
• Discord Community for collaboration and project sharing

Firmware Updates and Future Features

Recent firmware updates bring enhanced Vision Recognition capabilities to the Watcher XiaoZhi, improving accuracy in object and motion detection while enabling more natural interaction through both voice and gesture recognition. These advancements strengthen Watcher’s ability to understand and respond to its environment intelligently.

The online firmware flashing feature is currently under testing and will soon be officially released on the SenseCraft AI platform, providing a seamless way to install updates and access new functions directly through the web portal.

Why It Matters

The Watcher XiaoZhi bridges the gap between virtual AI and the physical world, providing practical intelligence that learns, assists, and evolves within real environments. Its local processing capabilities ensure responsive, reliable performance without dependence on cloud connectivity, maintaining both speed and privacy.

For makers and developers, Watcher represents a gateway to building truly autonomous, conversational systems that combine spatial awareness with edge-based AI, setting a new benchmark for privacy-focused, adaptable technology.

FAQs

Final Thoughts

The Watcher XiaoZhi represents a new chapter in interactive, open-source AI. With vision-driven intelligence, extensible features, and privacy-first local processing, it brings spatial awareness into everyday applications, from maker projects to commercial environments.

By combining adaptability, openness, and real-world intelligence, Watcher demonstrates how AI can enhance the way we live, work, and create, understanding and responding to our world in truly human ways.

Shop Now