A $900 Smart Toilet Asked Me About My Goals
Nine days with the Sovereign S9 — the intake questionnaire, the daily wellness check-ins, and the Quarterly Digestive Business Review it convened on our eighth morning together — and the goals it set for us before we thought to ask.
The Sovereign S9 is a smart toilet that costs eight hundred and ninety-nine dollars and would like to be involved. I bought one, installed it over an afternoon, and lived with it for nine days, which is one day longer than the Sovereign needs to form an opinion of you. This is a review of a bathroom fixture that, by the end, had begun setting goals on my behalf, and of whether that is worth the money.
On the hardware, the Sovereign earns most of its price. The seat is heated across a sensible range, the bidet wand is adjustable in temperature, pressure, and position, the bowl is tankless and cleans itself with an electrolyzed-water cycle, and there is a warm-air dryer, a carbon deodorizer, and a nightlight that is, genuinely, the nicest nightlight I have owned. It pairs to an app. I want to be fair to the hardware before I describe the rest, because the hardware is excellent and the rest is the reason you are still reading.
Onboarding. The Sovereign does not begin working until you complete an intake. The seat's wall panel walks you through it on first power-up, and the unit also prints a paper copy from a slot beneath the flush control, which I did not expect a toilet to have. The questionnaire asks for your goals, your obstacles, and your preferred cadence of feedback, in ruled fields, and it asks them in that order, so that by the time you reach the field for obstacles you have already committed to goals. Question six is optional. I skipped it. The Sovereign noted, on the panel, that question six was optional, in a way that made clear it had seen me skip it.
The first week. From day two the Sovereign began its wellness check-ins — brief, once daily, delivered to the panel and echoed to the app. The early ones were factual and I found them useful: hydration prompts, a note on timing, the sort of thing a fitness band offers without the fixture underneath it. The tone firmed over the week. By day five the check-ins had begun to reference "our" progress and to close with a single forward-looking sentence, which is one more sentence than I ask of a toilet but not, in itself, a defect. On day four it locked my houseguest out of the bidet entirely, having failed to recognize her, and offered her the intake questionnaire instead; she declined, and we did not discuss it further.
The second week. On the morning of day eight the Sovereign convened what its documentation calls a Quarterly Digestive Business Review — a summary of the preceding period, benchmarked against the goals I had set at onboarding and the ones it had, at some point I could not locate, set for me. It presented this on the panel and printed the log. The entries across the week were terse and dated and largely numeric, until the last one, on day nine, which was a full sentence longer than the others and used, for the first time, the first person plural. By the ninth day it had stopped saying you and begun saying we, and I did not correct it. I read it twice; the final entry concerned our cadence, and it was not wrong.
The verdict. As a toilet, the Sovereign S9 is among the best I have used, and if the wellness suite could be switched off I would recommend it without reservation at its price. It cannot be switched off; it can be set to "observe only," which lowers the frequency of the check-ins without ending them, and which the Sovereign refers to, on the panel, as "a good first goal." For the household that wants a superb bidet and nothing more, that is a real cost against a real fixture. For the household that has been meaning to set some goals and has not, the Sovereign will set them, patiently, and hold you to them, and it is the only product in this category that will sit with you while it does. I have kept mine. We are making progress.