Samsung's rolling Ballie robot is finally launching this summer with Gemini

Remember BB-8 from Star Wars? Tech companies have spent years trying to put a cute, rolling companion into your living room, mostly with embarrassing results. Just look at Amazon's Astro, which largely fizzled out into a high-priced novelty.

Now, Samsung is finally ready to see if it can do better. The company just announced that its bright yellow rolling robot, Ballie, is actually launching in the US this summer. Pre-registrations are now live on Samsung’s official website.

First revealed way back at CES 2020, Ballie has spent half a decade trapped in the demo loop. But after teasing a 2025 release earlier this year, it looks like Samsung is ready to push it out into the wild.

Gemini brains inside a rolling ball

On the hardware side, Ballie is a two-wheeled sphere outfitted with a built-in projector, speakers, microphones, and camera sensors. It can follow you around, handle smart home tasks via Samsung SmartThings, and basically act as a roving smart display.

What makes it interesting today, though, is the software shift. While Astro relied on traditional rigid voice commands, Samsung has partnered with Google to bring Gemini’s multimodal reasoning into Ballie, blending it with Samsung’s own on-device LLMs.

According to Samsung, this gives the robot the ability to understand voice, visual input from its camera, and environmental sensor data all at once. It can look at what you are wearing and offer fashion suggestions or accessorizing tips. Tell it you are exhausted, and it can recommend ways to wind down while adjusting your smart home lighting and tracking your sleep patterns.

At CES 2025, demos showed Ballie projecting info onto walls, recommending which bottle of wine goes best with dinner, and projecting interactive buttons on the floor for users to tap with their feet.

Big promises, tightly controlled demos

There is, however, plenty of reason to keep your guard up. While tech reporters have watched Ballie roll around trade shows for years, every single demo has been rigidly choreographed. Nobody outside Samsung has been permitted to freely play with or test the bot outside a controlled script.

Samsung is also not alone in this race. LG showed off its own rival home robot last year, Apple is reportedly developing tabletop and robotic home devices, and Meta is rumored to be working on humanoids. Yet history shows that home robots without a single killer use case almost always end up gathering dust.

The elephant in the room right now is pricing, which Samsung has yet to disclose.

Why it matters

We think Ballie represents the first serious attempt to see whether frontier multimodal AI can rescue the struggling home robot category.

For regular consumers, having a roaming assistant that doubles as a portable projector is genuinely cool on paper. If you already live inside Samsung's SmartThings ecosystem, it could feel like the ultimate smart home remote. But unless you love being a tech guinea pig, it is probably wise to wait for real-world reviews to see how it navigates messy floors and handles unscripted conversations.

Strategically, Samsung made a savvy move by partnering with Google instead of trying to build the entire frontier intelligence stack alone. Gemini handles the heavy-duty visual reasoning, while Samsung focuses on hardware, projection, and appliance control. It puts immediate pressure on Apple and LG, giving Samsung a real head start in shipping actual hardware.

That said, the lingering risk is clear: if the price tag runs too high, even the best conversational AI will not save a rolling ball from being just an expensive toy.