"Jump in place and try a plank." When a person gave a voice command, a 132-centimeter-tall Humanoid Robot hesitated for a moment, then lowered its body and moved its arms and legs. Instead of repeating a set routine, it carried out full-body movements according to instructions heard from the side. This was a voice-control demo of the budget Humanoid Robot G1 unveiled by Unitree, a Chinese robot company that faces an initial public offering (IPO) review at the Shanghai Stock Exchange on Aug. 1.
According to the industry on the 29th, Unitree is accelerating efforts to boost its software capabilities—the brain of the robot—ahead of its listing. The feature highlighted in this demo is "action-generation artificial intelligence (AI)," which converts human speech into full-body robot motion. It does more than just understand commands like a smart speaker; it interprets verbal instructions and translates them into physical actions. For example, if a person says, "Turn around," the robot calculates foot placement, waist rotation, and arm balance to move the machine.
Unitree said, "Based on external speech, the AI generates actions in real time, so no pre-set trajectories are needed." Traditional Humanoid Robot demos often replayed developer-scripted motions or relied on human teleoperation. Now, a robot's ability to autonomously synthesize and execute movements is becoming the new battleground.
Following the voice demo, Unitree also unveiled its embodied-intelligence model WVLA 2.0, which organizes conference-room items without remote control. In a video Unitree posted, the G1 recognizes, sorts, and tidies up objects in a meeting room. Unitree has long been judged weaker in AI than in hardware, and its string of software disclosures is seen as an attempt to fill that gap. In fact, Unitree increased its research and development spending in the first quarter this year by 38,328,000 yuan (about 8.5 billion won), investing more in large embodied-intelligence models and locomotion control algorithms than in the same period a year earlier.
The industry took note of Unitree's demo because the feature ran on a budget model priced in the $10,000 range, not on an expensive research robot. The G1 is a Humanoid Robot platform Unitree released two years ago. Depending on the model, it carries 23 to 43 joint motors, 3D lidar, a depth camera, and microphones. After unveiling the Humanoid Robot H1 in 2023—the industry's first to do a standing backflip—Unitree has improved balance control, setting a world running record and more. The strategy is to lower hardware prices to speed adoption and rapidly layer AI control features on top.
Chinese robot makers are seizing the early Humanoid Robot market with this approach. While U.S. firms have focused on technical polish with high-performance machines and proprietary AI models, Chinese companies have chased by putting relatively affordable humanoids into the market first and accumulating real-world operating data. Unitree said it shipped about 5,500 Humanoid Robots last year, and AgiBot, a Chinese robot corporations in its fourth year, also shipped about 5,200 units in 2025, placing it among the global leaders by volume. Tesla in the United States pledged shipments of 10,000 Humanoid Robots last year, but actual production is said to have been only in the hundreds.
Competition in the humanoid sector is steadily shifting toward AI directly generating robot motion. Figure AI first unveiled its vision-language-action (VLA) model Helix last year, followed in March by Helix 02, which unifies locomotion and manipulation into a single action stream. Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research are applying large action models to the Humanoid Robot Atlas, and AgiBot has released a generative control model that converts text, voice, and video inputs into robot actions.