Ballie: a ball-shaped robot shown for six years and never sold

A tennis ball that followed you around

Samsung unveiled Ballie at CES in January 2020. It was a ball-shaped robot the size of a tennis ball that would follow its owner using a camera and control smart devices around the home. Samsung said the AI would run on the device to protect privacy. When Ballie returned at CES 2024 it had grown to the size of a bowling ball. It now carried a 1080p projector, lidar and front and rear cameras, and could throw a screen onto a wall or floor while controlling appliances.

Promised for 2025, shelved in 2026

In January 2025 Samsung said Ballie would launch in the first half of the year. In April it announced Gemini integration with Google Cloud and a launch in the US and Korea in summer 2025. The summer passed without sales. Korea Times reported that Samsung was still looking for Ballie's place in homes already full of AI devices, and Samsung said only that it was refining the technology. Ballie was missing from CES 2026, and Bloomberg reported that the launch had been shelved indefinitely. Samsung said it would keep Ballie as an internal innovation platform. In February the US sign-up page disappeared and began redirecting to a projector product page. No price was ever announced.

Seen only on show floors

Nobody has used Ballie at home. The only reviews came from journalists at CES demos. In 2024 TechCrunch asked whether the features would persuade people to buy it, and whether it would reach the market at all. A Samsung spokesperson responded to the shelving report: “After multiple years of real-world testing, it continues to inform how Samsung designs spatially aware, context-driven experiences, particularly in areas like smart home intelligence, ambient AI and privacy-by-design.”

More features, no clear job

Each time Ballie reappeared it gained features such as a projector, lidar and generative AI. What it could do that phones, smart speakers and TVs already in the home could not was never made clear. Amazon Astro went to market through invitation-only sales and gathered real feedback. Ballie stopped before any user could judge it. It is a case of a large company's prototype drawing attention for years without becoming a product.

Is the job this product would do at home one that the devices already there cannot do?

What we haven’t confirmed

• The original wording of the Bloomberg report and when the decision was made
• How far the Gemini integration actually got
• The size of the development team and budget
• Whether the Korean launch was cancelled separately