Half-a-trillion-dollar smart home market experiences the twinkle of expansion with this summer’s arrival of Ballie
April 14, 2025: Samsung has teamed up with Google Cloud to deploy the latter‘s generative AI technology on Ballie—Samsung‘s AI robot companion. The atmosphere in the smart home setup is one of optimism as the AI robot will assist users with controlling home atmosphere, including reminder settings, dimming lighting, personalizing routine and welcoming at the door, among others.
Taking stock of the news, Samsung Electronics’ Executive Vice President in charge of Visual Display Business Yongjae Kim urged that the partnership would “unlock a new era of personalized AI companion“ and redefine the role of AI in the home.
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian made similar remarks; he referred to Samsung‘s bringing generative AI at scale to the market and their partnership‘s focus on offering enterprise-grade, reliable AI.
For its part, Ballie will reportedly go on sale to customers (in the US and Korea) this summer. Plans for taking it to other markets, though, have not yet been shared.
These events have had a notable influence on the smart home market, which is likely to be a half-a-trillion-dollar industry (USD 537.27 billion) by 2030. The foray of Gen AI appears to be complementing smart appliances, smart thermostats and smart lighting.
For instance, Ballie will reportedly use proprietary Samsung language models and Gemini’s multimodal capabilities to take in voice commands, environmental inputs from sensors and visual data through its sensors.
For the record, the robot first appeared at Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2020; the world got to see the polished version last January at CES 2025.
