Samsung’s home robot Ballie is finally poised to roll into our homes… and maybe our hearts? Following teasing a release sometime this year at CES 2025, the company has now announced that the cute rolling bot will arrive in the US this summer, with pre-registration open on Samsung’s website.
The ball-shaped robot is equipped with two wheels and designed as a personal assistant for the home. First announced in 2020, it has gone through a number of upgrades over the years and now features a built-in projector, speaker, and microphone.
With capabilities similar to that of smart displays, including controlling your home through Samsung SmartThings, comparisons to Amazon’s unsuccessful Astro home robot are easy to draw, but Ballie has something Astro does not: generative AI powers.
Samsung has partnered with Google to bring its Gemini multimodal reasoning to the bot. Paired with Samsung’s own generative AI large language models, this should allow Ballie to “process and understand a variety of inputs, including audio and voice, visual data from its camera, and sensor data from its environment,” says the company.
With Gemini on board, the bot can now look at you and judge your style, offering accessorizing tips and other sartorial suggestions, says Samsung. It can also give you “tailored advice” when you tell it something like “I’m tired,” using “trusted sources” to advise you on how to get more exercise and use its integration with a person’s smart home to “optimize their sleeping environment, or monitor their sleep patterns.”
Several Verge staffers have seen demos of Ballie over the years. At CES this year, Chris Welch saw Ballie projecting requested information on a wall and identifying which bottle of wine would go best with dinner. The demo also showed someone interacting with Ballie through voice and pressing projected buttons with their feet.
While its BB-8-styling has been a constant delight, all the demos we’ve seen have been very tightly controlled, and we’ve never been allowed to touch or interact with the bot. On top of that, Samsung has yet to actually deliver anything, until (maybe) now.
But to date, home robots without specific use cases have struggled to catch on. Whether Ballie, with its advanced AI capabilities, will prove to be indispensable remains to be seen – but with an actual launch date, Samsung has a head start. The big question, though, is how much it will cost?