Samsung Electronics’ much-ballyhooed home robot, Ballie, is finally coming home after years of sneak-peeks, teases and revisions.
The South Korean behemoth and Google Cloud said Wednesday that the cute rolling bot will bounce into the U.S. this summer, part of an expanded partnership to bring GCP’s generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology to Ballie. [Google is also bringing Google’s Gemini multimodal reasoning to the bot.] Pre-registration opened on Samsung’s website, though the company has yet to announce a price.
The personal assistant robot, which comes on two wheels, was introduced in 2020. Since then, it has gone through a series of upgrades, and now features a built-in projector, speaker and microphone.
The home AI companion robot, as Samsung describes it, will be able to scoot about the house, where it will follow “natural, conversational interactions” to perform chores like greeting visitors at the front door and offering their human master fashion suggestions when they dress.
The small robot can hear and see its users, and freely moves without getting in the way of people, as demonstrated over the years at the annual CES conference in Las Vegas in January, the Super Bowl of consumer tech.
Samsung has posted a promotion page for Ballie with videos. One clip shows the bouncing bot projecting an interactive video on a wall.
“Through this partnership, Samsung and Google Cloud are redefining the role of AI in the home,” Yongjae Kim, executive vice president of the visual display business at Samsung Electronics, said in a statement announcing the release of Ballie. “By pairing Gemini’s powerful multimodal reasoning with Samsung’s AI capabilities in Ballie, we’re leveraging the power of open collaboration to unlock a new era of personalized AI companion — one that moves with users, anticipates their needs and interacts in more dynamic and meaningful ways than ever before.”
Samsung enters a race with plenty of players but not much product to show for it. Apple Inc. reportedly is developing a home robot, Meta Platforms Inc. is working on a humanoid robot, and Google has robots in the works. But it remains unclear when, or if, any will be released soon.
For the most part, home bots without specific use cases — think of iRobot Corp.’s Roomba vacuum cleaner and Braava floor mopper as successful exceptions — have struggled to catch on. Amazon.com Inc.’s Astro home robot, offers one particularly cautionary tale.
But with advanced AI capabilities, Ballie could break the mold, Samsung executives are betting.
