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Samsung unveils Ballie 2.0 at CES 2024: A Smart AI Companion with autonomous features and Star Wars-inspired charm
Samsung showed off the latest version of their AI companion robot, Ballie, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2024. Ballie is a smart home companion that can help out around the house. The first version of Ballie was introduced at CES 2020.
Ballie is a robot companion that can autonomously roam the home, interact with smart appliances, answer phone calls, and provide text and video updates when people are away from home. Samsung says that Ballie will be able to learn from users’ patterns and habits to provide smarter, more personalized services. In the Samsung demo video, Ballie patrols the house. Upon finding the dog causing a bit of mischief, Ballie feeds the dog and plays on the floor to soothe the dog. One of Ballie’s cool tricks is the ability to project videos on the wall or floor, like workout videos, conference calls, or animated greetings.
It is not hard to imagine that popular culture, particularly Star Wars, influenced the Samsung engineers. In Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope, R2-D2 projected videos (holograms) to relay messages and information. Ballie’s ability to rotate reminds you of the droid BB-8 from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, who is a sphere-based robot that rolls around. Sadly, much like R2-D2 and BB-8, Ballie is not yet available to the general public.
Hopefully, we will not have to wait a long time before we can have an adorable AI companion of our own. We could all use a little help around the house, or perhaps saving the galaxy.
You can check out the video below to see Ballie in action.
Here is the link to the Samsung press announcement.
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