I’ve never been a fan of robot vacuums, but theEcovacs DEEBOT X8 PRO OMNIhas changed that. This flagship vacuum doesn’t come cheap, but it also doesn’t disappoint. With impressive prowess at both vacuuming and mopping and accessible voice controls, this bot was a joy to welcome into my home.
Ecovacs Deebot X8 PRO OMNI
The Deebot X8 PRO OMNI and 12-in-1 base station sit at the top of Ecovacs' robot vacuums. An impressive 18000Pa suction sets this apart from much of the competition, as do the optional voice commands. While not maintenance free, the X8 PRO OMNI does a great job of cleaning your home and cleaning itself in between runs.
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Price and Availability
The DEEBOT X8 PRO OMNI sits at the top of Ecovacs' robot vacuum product line. It retails for $1,300 and is available from Ecovacs, Amazon, and Best Buy.
Specifications
A High-End, Sci-Fi Robot Setpiece
The DEEBOT X8 PRO OMNI comes in a rather large box, but the setup process is quick and straightforward. There is a lot of plastic to remove, but the process is well explained.
Before using the vacuum for the first time, you must pick a spot for the base and fill up one of the tanks with water. When facing the unit, the tank on the right holds clean water. Dirty water will later go into the tank on the left.
The DEEBOT X8 PRO OMNI is a robot attractive enough that you won’t be bothered to place it in a prominent area of your home. I placed my review unit in our living room, next to the TV stand.
The robot is black with golden highlights. The bot’s design wouldn’t feel out of place in Cyberpunk 2077, quietly cleaning up after you’ve wrecked the inside of a bar. I could picture this AI-enabled vacuum holding an awkward conversation with 343 Guilty Spark, a floating orb from Halo, about the best way to maintain a home.
The robot’s charging base has a light that communicates core information, like whether the robot is charging or if your water tank needs refilling. This base also has gold tabs and markings, contributing to the feel of this being a premium vacuum. That’s not to say that this vacuum is all about looks—but if I was basing my purchase on looks alone, this one would surely be a contender.
An App for Controls, Mapping, and Information
You can tell the DEEBOT X8 PRO OMNI to start cleaning by tapping the button on top of the unit. Tapping this button again ends cleaning and sends the robot back home. For anything more, you need to download the companion app.
Ecovacs' app (available on Android and iPhone) displays the vacuum’s current status, letting you know when the device is charging or in the process of cleaning. The bulk of the controls center around a map of your home, which the robot does a surprisingly fast job of creating. I live in a 3,000 sq ft home, and the robot was able to map the entire area in around 10-20 minutes.
When I opened the app to judge its work, the map was pretty spot on, with just a few interior walls missing. The robot tries to guess which room is which, but I rather it didn’t. It considers part of my kids' room in the interior of the home to be a balcony. This isn’t that big of a deal since you can rename each room on your own.
you may also use the Ecovacs app to monitor where the vacuum is working. This is especially handy when you hear the robot shout from the other room: “Bumper stuck! Please tap the bumper and ensure it bounces back!” The bot’s location on the map isn’t always current, and I spend a decent portion of my steps going from room to room looking for where the DEEBOT X8 PRO OMNI has stopped.
With the app, you can tell the vacuum to only vacuum a specific room instead of its default behavior of cleaning the entire house. You can also give it a sequence of rooms to clean. If you want to set a schedule, that’s supported, too. So are the options to set up temporary virtual boundaries, such as if you’ve left piles of clothes on the floor that you haven’t finished folding yet. The selection of options is pretty comprehensive. I have noticed a little jankiness here or there, but restarting the app usually resolves the occasional glitch.
Using Voice Commands With a Vacuum Just Makes Sense
When I first set up the vacuum, I had zero interest in the AI assistant. I didn’t care about its name (Yiko), and I didn’t use it for quite a while.
I then discovered that Yiko wasn’t here for conversation. The so-called AI’s role is to serve as an alternative way to give the vacuum commands. To tell the vacuum to clean a specific room, you can just say out loud, “OK, Yiko, go clean the office.” While I’ve never been a fan of voice commands—I’ve gone this long without owning an Amazon Echo or shouting “OK Google” for anything more than testing an app—there is something that feels different about talking to a robot vacuum.
For starters, our family already talks about the robot vacuum as if it were a family member or pet. We named it, and my young daughter asks if it’s sleeping. It feels almost cute to be able to talk to the robot directly, not just talk about it.
After diving in, I realized that YIKO isn’t an AI chatbot, despite being labeled in the app as “YIKO-GPT.” YIKO is purely a voice assistant. There are select commands it can respond to, and those are all related to doing its job. You can tell Yiko to start cleaning, go recharge, or adjust suction power. You can tell it to clean under specific pieces of furniture, like the dining table, if you’ve labeled those within the app. It will also respond to more conversational commands, like “OK, Yiko, go away.”
After bending over to pause or unpause the DEEBOT X8 PRO OMNI throughout the day or having to go find where I put my phone, I eventually reached the point where the voice controls won me over.
Powerful Suction Paired With Excellent Mopping
Since our home consists of only one story, it’s an ideal space for a robot vacuum. With all of the doors open, one robot can clean every room of the house. This is no small task, and I found the robot to take a comparable amount of time as a human vacuuming and mopping each room. It takes the robot several hours to do the entire home. I have yet to see it clean the entire house in one go, but that has more to do with my kids getting home before the robot is done, and my daughter is not a fan.
The DEEBOT X8 PRO OMNI can vacuum for over three hours before needing to recharge, which isn’t long enough to clean all of our floors in one go. Breaking the cleaning sessions into two parts has worked out well. The robot cleans half of the house while the kids are at school and the remaining half after dinner when the kids are getting ready for bed.
Some robots can struggle with poor lighting. The DEEBOT X8 PRO OMNI has so far done okay. Performance at night doesn’t seem to be noticeably different than during the day. It regularly cleans dimly spaces in our home, lit only by a few night lights, and the ambient lighting extends out from under our kitchen cabinets.
“Cleans” is a broad term when it comes to robot vacuums. In this case, your money buys you a robot that both vacuums and mops your floors. The roller mop is based on technical expertise the company has developed from its Tineco product line of stick vacuums and mops.
I have been beyond satisfied with how well this robot mops. Several days go by before I need to refill the tank, and while it’s a good practice to empty the dirty water tank each day, I can go several days before that fills up as well.
When the robot returns to the base, it washes and dries its own mop. When I took the mop out to manually clean it after a week of use, I found there was nothing for me to do. The robot had done an excellent job cleaning itself.
What about the floors? While the robot doesn’t scrub hard enough to get crayon off of floors, it can easily handle spills. I squirted yellow mustard in front of the robot to see how well it would handle that little surprise, and there wasn’t a trace of it after a single pass.
Should You Buy the Ecovac X8 Pro Omni?
At $1,300, theDEEBOT X8 PRO OMNIsits at the highest end of the robot vacuum market. It competes with the likes of theEufy Omni S1 Proand theDreame X40 Ultra. Each of these vacuums have different selling points, and without hands-on experience with competing products, I can’t tell you directly how they compare.
What I can say is that the DEEBOT X8 PRO OMNI has delivered on virtually all of its promises. I rarely need to vacuum up spots the robot has missed, the kitchen floor and entryway in particular have benefited from regular mopping, and the app’s mapping controls have enabled me to teach the robot which problem spots to avoid over time, reducing how often it gets stuck.
Yet the vacuum still requires a degree of babysitting, at least initially. If you don’t want to cordon off places in the app, don’t be surprised if the vacuum gets stuck under the same TV stand that is ever-so-slightly too low each day. It does a good job cleaning along edges, but it can still get tangled up by a cord or something cord-like. Spending this amount of money doesn’t make all the frustrations of a robot vacuum go away, but it does buy you one that works well and that you can teach with time.
