A year after Ballie's no-show, Samsung has once again promised to bring its adorable companion robot to market this Northern Hemisphere summer.
The diminutive bot first broke cover in 2019, made a splash at CES in 2020, and then vanished until last year's expo. Ballie initially rolled around and only just controlled your smart home devices.
The updated version came with a 1080p projector that it could use to show you workout videos wherever you chose to exercise around the house, display recommended recipes as you rifled through your fridge, and stream your doorbell camera's feed when you had a visitor. Here it is in action from 2024:
Now, the company says its bot is even smarter, thanks to Google Gemini AI in the cloud. That unlocks multimodal capabilities, meaning it can accept audio and voice inputs, gather visual data using its camera, and use sensors to understand what's happening around it.
Samsung says you can expect it to check out the fit of your clothes, give you styling recommendations, and provide tips on improving your well-being – all in response to natural language commands. It'll also adjust your lighting and set reminders.
The company plans to make it available this summer in the US and South Korea, but hasn't revealed pricing yet. That'll likely be up in the air for the next few months anyway, seeing as how President Trump is playing peek-a-boo with tariffs at the moment.
If you're looking for even more hands-on help around the house, you'll need to wait a bit. Humanoid robots from Figure are set to begin alpha testing in the home sometime this year. Norwegian startup 1X also showed its Neo Gamma robot doing household chores back in February, and plans to start testing it in "a few hundred to a few thousand" homes by the end of 2025.
You can sign up on Samsung's site to be notified when Ballie goes on sale.
Source: Samsung