Samsung’s Ballie robot companion is still available in yellow, but has more AI and a promised 2025 launch
- Samsung’s Ballie robot is back at CES 2025.
- It has an identical design to the 2024 design, with new ‘Vision AI’ features.
- Samsung says Ballie will launch in the first half of 2025 with support for English, Spanish and Korean for an undisclosed price.
If you’ve been wondering where Samsung’s cheerful yellow AI robot companion has been, we finally know the answer. Ballie, Samsung’s robot, which was first unveiled in 2020 and relaunched last year in 2024 with a boatload of AI, will arrive in 2025, specifically in the first half.
Ballie is still bright yellow with wheels to move around your house, a whole load of sensors and a projector that allows him to play games, answer questions and even project movies onto different surfaces. And I got the chance – along with Ny Breaking Managing Editor, Lifestyle Josephine Watson – to check out Ballie firsthand and see it make a few moves.
And yes, it’s still undeniably cute, and its wheels allow it to glide effortlessly across flat surfaces; this latest demo was on a soft wooden surface in a pre-mapped space. It still features a front projector, a Full HD triple-laser projector and should deliver quality close to the Premiere 5. Furthermore, it is the world’s first projector with a switchable lens, allowing it to project content both near and far.
Why is that important? In this demonstration we saw it list options for you on the floor, but it can also cast content like directions to the Sphere from Caeser’s Palace, or project a movie onto the wall.
It is voice-activated thanks to four built-in far-field microphones and responds to “Hey Ballie”. It gets its vision from two cameras – a 2K camera on the back and a 4K camera on the front – as well as sensors including LiDAR and a Time of Flight (ToF) sensor. Our hope is that Samsung’s slightly wobbly Samsung Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI performance has been taken into account.
Samsung promises a 2025 launch, specifically in the first half of the year, with English, Spanish and Korean support. However, the company didn’t give any hint about pricing, exact features or specifications, or even confirmed launch regions.
Just like saying “Hey Google” on an Android smartphone or asking for Siri on a HomePod, Ballie is a fully responsive voice-activated robot. It’s still billed as an AI robot companion that can float around your house and essentially be at your disposal. As you might guess, it’s ready to integrate with other devices, including the ability to control them. I suspect this is made possible via SmartThings, but in this demo Ballie was asked to enable a connected lamp and monitor function in a gaming setup.
We also saw Ballie provide a list of things to do in Las Vegas, with suggestions for the fountains at the Bellagio and the Sphere; it was able to understand a more conversational answer and then gave us more information about the Sphere. When Ballie was first asked and stood directly in front of the user, he projected the list onto the floor; it was then chosen to cast a larger image with more details of the Sphere, including images, onto the wall.
It seems like it automatically decides where to cast the content, but you can be more specific and even ask for a bigger screen when streaming a movie – it can even change the surface it’s casting on.
As for Ballie’s interesting path to launch, we asked Lydia Cho, Samsung’s Head of Product, Home Entertainment.
“We really wanted to perfect this and make sure it came to market at the right time, with the right features and the right concept. That’s why the process took a little longer, but I think this is really the right time to launch VisionAI,” Cho explains. She also mentioned that the new AI suite, which is also launching on Samsung’s latest TVs, is all about personalization and customization.
Cho notes that this device can be personalized based on your lifestyle and is completely focused on perfecting the interaction: “We think it’s the perfect companion for you to meet all your needs,” before noting that it you can tell the weather, where you want to go, your nutritional needs, a child’s homework assignment and even your schedule.
Still, there’s still a path to market for Ballie, and it’ll be interesting to see the final feature set, the technical specs, Samsung’s pitch to consumers and how well the device performs in practice. We still haven’t been able to actually drive Ballie or see it outside of a test space, but it’s clear that robots are an industry that’s not going away. Ballie, with its cheery yellow paint job, is certainly less scary or unassuming than Telsa’s humanoid bot or Boston Dynamics robot dog, and with Amazon’s Astro in permanent invite-only status, there’s room for market dominance should Samsung play its cards right .
Remember, this is the day before CES even starts, and Samsung showed this off before the official press conference at the First Look event, which is typically reserved for new home entertainment. It’s clear that Ballie is central to the mission, and you can be sure we’re trying to get into a more formal practice.
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