The Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra ($1,799.99, available in April) is a mouthful, but this iteration of the S8 line earns every syllable. Roborock’s new flagship keeps everything I loved about the S8 and adds a voice assistant, beefed up the cleaning base, beefed up the suction, and gives its brushes extended arms for reaching into the edges of rooms. The result is that the S8 line is my favorite robot vacuum, and the one to beat.

This version of the S8 doesn’t seem fundamentally different from the S8 I previously reviewed. The tower is substantial, although smaller than recent Eufy or Ecovacs vacuums. The important distinction here is that the S8 is now available with either a conventional base, where you have clean and dirty water tanks, or the R&D (rinse and drain) version, which has a very small base but connects directly to your mains water supply, allowing it to fill and drain itself. For this review, we tested the conventional base.

Roborock offers the S8 in black or white, and it has the same matte and glossy molded plastic details on the base and robot. The tanks are now a little more hidden within the base, rather than being part of the architecture. From the front, all you can see is a solid panel, but the tanks are still easily accessible from the top of the device. The front of the device is even held in magnetically and can be snapped off, giving you access to the vacuum bag behind it, as well as another new feature: a cleaning solution-only tank. I loved this feature; it meant I didn’t have to keep adding it to the water every time I refilled it. The robot itself looks similar to previous Roborock models, with the upgrades only visible when you flip the robot over.

I’ve never had any issues connecting and setting up Roborock models; they essentially come fully assembled out of the box, and connecting the unit is as simple as pressing a few buttons. The machine will announce what step it’s completing in the setup process, and the app will guide you through it as well. As with previous floor robots from this brand, I never had any issues with the machine going offline during my time testing it. I easily paired the vacuum to Google Home, and Roborock also works with Apple Homekit and Alexa. As with the Q Revo I reviewed earlier this week, the S8 MaxV Ultra comes with Rocky, a voice assistant, on board. As I noted earlier, the voice assistant is a nice addition that works, but has a very limited vocabulary and list of commands. If you learn the exact phrasing you need, you can ask the bot to clean a specific room, the entire house, or get back to base by getting its attention with the call, “Hi, Rocky.” You could ask Rocky to have the robot come to you and clean the spot where you are, but all my tests with this failed: the robot sailed past where I was standing. I imagine there will be updates for Rocky in the future.