Are robot butlers almost here? Get to know AlphaBot 2, the Chinese robot that might soon serve tea and clean the dishes

At the appropriately named Beyond Expo in China, tech company AI² Robotics has showcased its AlphaBot 2 humanoid robot, which could soon be a key part of your home.

Using embodied artificial intelligence, the performance from the robot at Beyond Expo was frighteningly advanced, playing a game of dice and interacting with human opponents when they won.

Technology website InterestinEngineering claims that “AlphaBot 2 can understand spoken commands, interact with its environment—like pressing the dice roller button—and respond emotionally, such as giving a thumbs-up when a human wins." It adds — terrifyingly — that the robot can learn by watching humans.

‘Now you just tell them what to do, the robot can understand’

AlphaBot 2 is already being used in car factories across China and there are also plans to use them at airports sometime in late 2025 for luggage cart organisation.

Guo Yandong, founder and CEO of AI² Robotics, said in a statement that the robot will feed real-time industrial data back to the company’s self-developed embodied large model, allowing it to develop on-the-go: “It will make our robots smarter and enable them to achieve breakthroughs in more challenging applications across a wider range of scenarios."

“In the last era of robots, people needed to program them to tell them what to do,” Guo told CNN correspondent Kristie Lu Stout on the sidelines of the conference. “Now you just tell them what to do, and the robot can understand the environment.”

“If you want to drink some tea, the robot can know where to fetch the teabag; it can know where to get hot water, and how to pour the hot water into the cup, and make tea for you," he concluded.

Equipped with 34 degrees of freedom, including a waist–leg mechanism, AlphaBot 2’s arms span 700 mm, reaching out to 240 cm, blending strength and precision. The inclusion of force feedback supports compliant manipulation, ideal for delicate tasks. Its sensory suite includes 360° multi-camera vision, microphones, environmental sensors, and facial-expression recognition, enabling Alphabot 2 to interpret human intent and adapt to unstructured environments.

GlobalTimes reference the Xinhua News Agency, who reported that: “a recent industry report forecast that China’s humanoid robot market will reach 8.24 billion yuan ($1.14 billion) this year, accounting for half of the global market. By 2030, the market could skyrocket to about 870 billion yuan ($121.4 billion).”

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