How Samsung’s Bespoke AI gear points to your future smart home
Samsung has officially announced its range of Bespoke AI appliances designed to make managing your smart home easier.
Samsung has officially announced its range of Bespoke AI appliances designed to make managing your smart home easier.
I got to see the products in action. There’s some extremely clever features that go beyond individual products for things like power saving and intelligent charging. Chief among these is the Samsung AI Jet Bot Combo that I first glimpsed back at CES 2024.
It definitely still feels like these technologies are for early adopters – but then the Bespoke AI range isn’t entry-level – the real breakthrough is going to come when such advanced tech is available on every new washer or robot vac.
Samsung’s smart home strategy is centred around the SmartThings app and ecosystem which is also open to Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. SmartThings tends to be seen as a poor relation of other smart home ecosystems, but it has nearly 300m users.
Probably the most useful advance is AI Energy Mode, which is designed to maximise the efficiency of your products. However, it’s still going to be opt-in for now. It’s not a default because there are some compromises in other ways so a wash cycle will be longer. It will also be cooler, too, reducing energy consumption by up to 70 percent. The Bespoke AI dishwasher can delay its cycle until non-peak hours and run then.
Later this year, intelligent charging use will also come into play as products are updated. The robot vac, for example, will only charge to 60 percent during peak hours – plenty for any cleaning it is required to do – and then top up off-peak.
Larger, more intuitive displays
Samsung is also introducing larger 7in displays on its devices, with the intention being that you can control things from wherever in your home. Samsung’s Bixby is still the path for voice control here though and a patchy demo showed that the voice assistant still isn’t up to the level of rivals.
Other innovations are more practical – Samsung has offered cameras in its high-end Family Hub fridges for years, but the latest in the lineup has a more advanced setup; it will recognise foods when you put them in, track predicted expiration dates and give on demand recipes based on those items.
The Samsung AI Ecobubble washing machines use new ‘Bubble Shot’ tech that increases the density of the detergent in the water and uses around 20 percent less water with the same amount of detergent,
In the US and Canada, Samsung has also teamed up with Tide to launch a cold wash cycle optimised to work in tandem with particular detergent.