Memo may not be the world’s fastest barista, but it is impressive—for a robot.

I recently watched as Memo, a new home robot from a company called Sunday Robotics, made coffee in an open-plan kitchen in Mountain View, California.

Memo looks like something out of Wall-E, with a gleaming white body, two arms, a friendly cartoonish face, and a red baseball cap. Rather than using legs as a fully humanoid robot would, Memo moves around using a wheeled platform and changes its height by sliding up and down a central column atop that platform.

The robot responded to a request for an espresso by rolling over to a countertop, and then using two pincerlike hands to slowly go through each step required to operate an espresso machine. It filled the porta filter with coffee grounds, tamped them down, slotted the porta filter into place and put a coffee cup below, pressed the buttons needed to start the machine, and finally retrieved the hot drink.

“We want to build robots that free people from laundry, from the dishes, from all chores,” Tony Zhao, cofounder and CEO of Sunday Robotics, told me as the robot brought the coffee over to the person who requested it.

Making a cup of espresso might not seem spectacular, but the feat is ridiculously hard for a robot to do in a real, messy kitchen. It requires the ability to identify different objects, figure out how to grasp them reliably, and use those objects properly. Sunday is not only building its own hardware but also training the models that allow its system to learn. “We think the way to make a home robot is to be full-stack, and to vertically integrate,” Zhao says. “And that’s a very ambitious thing to do.”

The device has no moving parts, with just a 3.5-inch touchscreen that covers its face and a few buttons on each side. These include power and volume buttons, and the now standard pair of “talk” buttons—one to recognize your partner’s voice and one for your own. In many modes, you won’t need to use these, however. Like most handheld translators, the unit includes a preloaded SIM 4G card that gives it near-global usability. (Vasco says it works “in nearly 200 countries,” which is a lot, since there are only 195 widely recognized nations today.) 2.4-GHz and 5-GHz Wi-Fi are also available when you’re in range of a hot spot or at a hotel.

The 2,500-mAh battery charges via USB-C. Vasco claims that the Q1 offers “many hours of intensive use” and up to 160 hours on standby—though note the battery will drain faster than you might expect even when it’s idling. “Many hours” in my testing was less than eight, but the 160-hour standby metric was roughly accurate.

Language support is robust, but details vary based on how you use the device. For voice-to-voice translation, it supports 86 languages. For text-based translation, that goes up to 108. Oddly, photo-based translations work with 113 languages. Lastly, real-time call translation has support for just 53 languages. I’ll get to each of these in a bit.

After a quick setup, the Q1 drops you into a straightforward interface that lines up its six functions, one over the other. In addition to the four modes mentioned above, the system offers a group chat feature that can support up to 100 participants in their own languages, and a basic learning mode that simply quizzes you on vocabulary, Duolingo style.

Chatty Cathy

Most users will likely spend the bulk of their time in conversation mode, which lets you carry on a one-on-one voice discussion with a real-life partner, each in the language of your choice. As is common for handheld translators, holding down one of two buttons—either the pair on the side mentioned earlier or another pair that appears on the touchscreen—lets you tell the Q1 who is talking.