Samsung Ballie rolled back into view this week. The tech giant, momentarily distracted from churning out smartphones, announced that its dinky home assistant would soon be trundling around people’s homes, sucking up data and dispensing advice like a tiny robot guru. And probably not raising a robot army and quietly killing you in your sleep. But then it does now have Gemini AI inside – and Google were once the Boston Dynamics guys of scariest ever Christmas video fame. So who knows?
Anyway, those of you with long memories might recall Ballie isn’t exactly box fresh. I first wrote about it for Stuff way back in 2020, suggesting it resembled the unholy union of a tennis ball and a Star Wars droid reject. Which might turn out to have been a bad idea if Ballie does get all stabby.
Back then, Ballie’s party tricks focused on responding to prompts to open curtains (despite having no arms – THAT WE KNOW OF), calling for help if you fall and are unresponsive (due to being attacked by, say, an angry home appliance), and ordering subservient smart vacuums to mop up any mess on the floor. Such as pools of blood.
A whole new Ball(ie) game?
The specifics of Samsung Ballie’s evolved skills remain under wraps, but we do know it has a speaker and a projector. Samsung’s pitch is that the robot will offer “proactive home assistance” delivered through “natural and conversational interactions”. Ballie can greet people at the door if you can’t be bothered yourself. It can personalise schedules you’ll ignore at your peril and search the web for health advice when you’re feeling ill. Best of all – and I’m not making this up – Samsung also envisions Ballie as a style guru, offering fashion advice. Or at least tips on your morning outfit.
The overly chirpy yet mildly dystopian cartoon promo video isn’t reassuring. Ballie snarkily dismisses someone’s old-school attire with a robotic “What goes around comes around!” It hypnotises a child by projecting TikTok on the wall, recommends some trendy shorts, and then scolds them that it’s time for school. And it tells a dad he should leave early for work, due to a traffic jam, then abruptly barks, “It is 10 o’clock – you are late again”, before rolling off in a self-indignant huff.
Perhaps something was lost in translation from the original Korean, but this doesn’t strike me as a winning personality for a plastic pal. More a robot that’s a handy shape to boot into a recycling bin when it’s annoyed you one time too many.
Orb-liviously flawed
Beyond the sinister stare Ballie gives direct to camera at the end of the promo video, as if challenging its inner Cylon, there’s one other big problem here. In 2020, Ballie’s decision-making process was a mystery. Today, the thing’s mainlining Google’s Gemini AI.
Now, I’ve used Gemini. Like every AI desperate to prove its worth (that worth being approximately infinity billion dollars), it is quite often a bit… crap. Sure, it can identify random widgets with uncanny precision. But with anything requiring nuance or, you know, not randomly being completely (yet confidently) wrong, proceed with caution.
Samsung nonetheless claims Ballie will “unlock a new era of personalised AI companion – one that moves with users, anticipates their needs and interacts in more dynamic and meaningful ways than ever before”. Which will be fine until the AI stumbles and Ballie demands you dress for work as a gigantic ant, in what you assume is an amusing satire on the workplace but your boss assumes is you having lost your mind.
Ballie won’t be able to instruct your Roomba to clean that mess up. Maybe we should all just stick to smartphones, non-smart mirrors, and leaving personal assistant robots in classic movies, where they belong.
Ballie will be available in select markets this summer – and presumably feature in a lot of eBay auctions this autumn.
