As CES began this year, one topic came up over and over again among reporters: “Where’s Ballie?" The personal robot that Samsung showed at CES 2024 left a huge impression on everyone—rolling around on the floor, following people around, while projecting images up onto the floor or wall. While not having as large a presence at CES as it did last year, Ballie popped up in the Samsung booth, presentation, and materials, with the news from Samsung that Ballie should be available “this year.”
It’s been a long road for Ballie since it was introduced at CES in 2020. At that point, Ballie was merely a concept that looked as if it had been 3D printed at home. By last year, Ballie was a fully functional model; as the centerpiece of the Samsung CES presentation, it promised to be a companion, a security team, and living embodiment of your voice assistant for SmartThings. (SmartThings is Samsung's smart home platform, arguably the fourth largest behind Apple, Google and Amazon.)
And then we heard nothing for most of the year.
By the time Ballie popped back up at IFA (an international tech expo) in September, it had improved dramatically as it inched closer to a real consumer-ready model. This Ballie interacted using real language and expressed emotions, results of tightly integrated AI. It could follow commands, call people, and predict the needs of people and pets in the home. It could recognize items you held and then give you information about them. It could make decisions about whether to project small bites of information or more detailed data, and then choose the right location to project that info.
In this year’s iteration, Ballie is being actively demonstrated for attendees, rather than simply having a one-time, spotlight demo. It projects choices for the user as virtual buttons on the floor, and can control devices via SmartThings integration.
Seeing Ballie’s current design (a sphere on two front wheels with a back fin for balance), I am reminded of the Enabot Rola, a tiny personal robot I’ve been testing the last few months. While I haven’t thought much of the Enabot generally, the design makes the robot surprisingly resilient. Regardless of what it bumps into or encounters (including the jaws of my Doberman), the low center of gravity allows the Enabot to recover its position upright quickly. I suspect Ballie might have the same resilience of movement.
While I don’t yet have any sense of pricing or availability beyond the loose commitment Samsung has offered reporters this week of a pending release within the next calendar year, what is abundantly clear is that with each appearance, Ballie becomes a more viable consumer product.
