You can buy or rent Ameca only as an organization, and Engineered Arts does not publish a price. The UK company sells and rents its full-size Ameca and the smaller Ameca Desktop to businesses, education departments, non-profits and research groups through a quote or its online store, and the store FAQ says Ameca Desktop is not available for residential use. Prices are shown only after you create a store account or ask sales.
Ameca also doesn’t walk. It is a stationary humanoid built for face-to-face conversation: an expressive head and arms on a fixed base, used at trade shows, museums, keynotes and reception desks.
What Ameca is
Ameca is a social humanoid robot made by the British company Engineered Arts. It was released in 2021, and the current full-size model is generation 2.6 (2024), according to the official Ameca specifications. Its value is in the face and upper body, not in carrying or assembling things.
- Size: 1,870 mm tall, 62 kg, standing on a 600 mm round base.
- Movement: 61 actuated degrees of freedom: 27 in the head and face, 5 in the neck, 4 in each shoulder, 5 in each arm, 4 in each hand and 3 in the torso. No legs are listed.
- Senses: an 8 MP camera in each eye, a microphone in each ear and a 4-channel chest microphone, plus a 20 W speaker.
- Power and setting: two mains outlets (110 to 240 V, 400 W), indoors only at 10 to 30°C and 45 to 60% humidity.
- Safety: 360° lidar safety sensors that keep a clear zone of at least 3.2 m across around the robot. CE certified.
- Warranty and upkeep: one year on parts and labor, with maintenance recommended every six months.
The hands have only four degrees of freedom each, so Ameca gestures rather than handles objects. If you want a humanoid that walks and does physical work, look at the robots in our humanoid robot companies guide instead.
How Ameca talks: Tritium and its AI services
Every Ameca runs Engineered Arts’ Tritium software. Tritium robotOS is a custom Linux build; Tritium AI is a cloud service that strings together speech recognition, a large language model and text-to-speech. The spec sheet lists default integrations with OpenAI ChatGPT, OpenAI Whisper and Amazon Polly, and says custom integrations are possible. Developers get REST and WebSocket control plus Python and Node.js SDKs.
The Ameca product page says the robot speaks more than 70 languages, ships with more than 50 preset facial expressions, and can follow separate speakers in a conversation. Customers set up “Roles” (a name, knowledge documents and personality) in plain text without code. There’s also a telepresence mode, in which a person speaks through the robot. That matters when you watch a demo: a fluent exchange may come from the AI service or from a remote operator. Our guide to spotting teleoperation explains what to look for.
Ameca or Ameca Desktop
Engineered Arts sells two Ameca sizes.
- Ameca (full size): the 1.87 m, 61-DoF robot above. Sold and rented by quote only, with a configurable order through sales.
- Ameca Desktop Gen 3: a head-and-shoulders version, 525 mm tall and 8.5 kg, with the same 27 facial degrees of freedom plus 5 in the neck (32 total). Gen 3 adds a chest wide-angle camera, mmWave radar, a 40 W speaker, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, according to the Ameca Desktop page. It is CE and FCC certified and can be ordered through the online store.
The company also sells Ami and Azi Desktop, which use the same desktop hardware with a female and male face.
What buying one involves
Owning the hardware is only half of the purchase. The Ameca Desktop store FAQ spells out the terms.
- Who can buy: qualified businesses and corporations, education departments and non-profits. Home use is not offered.
- Robot License: each robot needs one to use the AI services, connect to Tritium for remote setup and get remote helpdesk support. A license includes 1 million AI tokens per year.
- Commitment: store purchases bill the license annually on a three-year term, starting when the robot is first powered on and connected, and it renews automatically. Prepaid and enterprise terms are available from sales.
- If you stop paying: the robot loses its AI services and Tritium access, so its conversation features become restricted and support is limited. You still own the hardware.
- Warranty and shipping: 12 months on Desktop Gen 3 hardware, extended cover sold separately. Engineered Arts ships to most countries; delivery time depends on location and order.
To order:
- Create a free account on store.engineeredarts.com to see Desktop prices, or use the contact sales form for a full-size Ameca or a custom configuration.
- Ask what the Robot License costs over three years and how many AI tokens your use will need. Engineered Arts says token use depends on the number and type of conversations and the AI model chosen, and that it hasn’t yet published an estimating guide.
- Confirm warranty length, on-site commissioning and shipping to your country before you sign.
Renting Ameca for an event
Renting is how most people meet Ameca. Engineered Arts rents the full-size Ameca, Ameca Desktop, Ami, Azi and some Mesmer robots, mainly for short events such as trade shows and conferences. Its rental page says the fee covers shipping, setup, breakdown and on-site engineers for the whole event, and that it won’t rent to two companies at the same event. Longer rentals are possible by arrangement. Rental prices are quoted per booking.
About the $133,000 price you see online
The figure of about $133,000 comes from news coverage when Ameca launched in 2021. It is not a current Engineered Arts price, and the robot has since gone through hardware generations and moved to a licensed software model. Higher figures on aggregator and marketplace sites are estimates, not quotes. For a real number, ask Engineered Arts for a quote that includes the three-year license.
For other robots you can’t simply order online, see how Boston Dynamics prices Spot and what happened to SoftBank’s Pepper.