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Smart home integration
The Deebot Ozmo 930’s second biggest selling point might be its integration with both Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa.
If you own a Google Home or Amazon Echo smart speaker, you can use commands like “Hey Google, ask Deebot to start/stop cleaning” or “Alexa, ask Deebot to start charging”.
While ‘Ecovacs’ or ‘Deebot’ is not yet visible in Google Assistant’s Actions directory or under Alexa’s Skills in Australia (where we tested for this review), you can still link the Deebot Ozmo 930 to either (or both if you want) by asking Alexa or Google Assistant to “talk to Deebot”. Make sure you’re signed into your Ecovacs account and you’ll be able to link your Google Home or Alexa app to the Ozmo 930 by choosing ‘United Kingdom’ as a country option for now.
Onced linked, you’ll be ready to “talk to Deebot” to issue commands – but, as a quick word of warning, you should also be prepared to be called “Master” when you do.
For the now, the only voice commands available to you are for starting and stopping an Auto cleaning cycle or sending the Ozmo 930 back to the charger. We tested our review unit with a Google Home smart speaker and the vacuum responded immediately to all three of those commands.
We hope more functions will be added in the future and we’ve also asked Ecovacs Robotics to let us know when the Ecovacs Deebot Action/Skill will become visible in Australia; we’ll update this review as soon as we have confirmation.
Maintenance
The bin in the Ozmo 930 is smaller than the one in the Electrolux PUREi9, so you might need to clean it out after two cycles, depending on the size of your home and the floor area covered by carpets.
Emptying the bin is easy, though: just open up the vacuum’s top lid, pull out the handle and lift it out. The side of the bin opens up, so make sure you turn it over before opening it. To replace the empty bin, align the handle to the notch in the vacuum and fold back.
Before you replace it, however, you may need to clean the bin space within the bot. You’ll occasionally find a tiny amount of dust falls out as you’re removing the bin, as the mouth is large, but it’s not a cause for concern.
To keep the undercarriage clean, you can use the multipurpose cleaning tool we mentioned earlier. You’ll find it sitting in a spot just in front of the bin. This nifty little thing has a soft bristle brush on one end and a small blade on the other. The brush can be used to clean the filter or dust off the body of the bot, while the blade is handy if you want to get hair off the wheels and the bar brush. It’s a nice thoughtful addition.
Verdict
The main reason to get yourself a robot vacuum cleaner is so you can either put your feet up and get something else to do all the hard work for you, or so you get more time to do more important things – or perhaps both. The Deebot Ozmo 930 will do just that for you and goes further than most other robovacs.
There’s not much we can fault with this little droid: it vacuums, it mops and it does so quite well: Ecovacs Robotics has pretty much aced it with both hardware and software. It’s already a must-have in our books, and if there was a way to increase suction power in these robot vacuums, the Deebot Ozmo 930 would be the perfect helper, no matter what type of floor you have at home. Add to that the ability to control it remotely and the addition of voice control makes this robot worth every penny.
However, if you’re someone that has a split-level home, the 930's stubborn insistence on mapping means you’ll either need to buy two units – one for each level – or to wait until Ecovacs can figure out how to allow multiple maps on the app.
