Of all the exciting things I saw at CES 2025, one development stands head and shoulders above the rest; Samsung’s plans for the AI home of the future, and how the tech giant plans to bring all of its devices into the fold.
Ever since I started reporting on smart home devices, I’ve firmly believed that it is the single most important area of consumer tech. It’s tied to how we personalize our home and express ourselves through smart lighting, how we make our lives more efficient through automation, how we maintain a comfortable and safe living space while also moderating our energy usage. Of course, it’s not all rosy, with privacy and security considerations yet to be resolved and cost barriers abound.
However, things are changing; alongside Matter improving smart home interoperability, Samsung’s wide-ranging products and Galaxy AI are lining up to offer the earliest example of a truly connected whole-home and lifestyle ecosystem, blending gadgets across verticals with smart home infrastructure.
That’s right, I’ve been vindicated; the smart home is, in fact, the molten core of our future tech-assisted lives. At least, based on Samsung’s vision for the future of SmartThings.
Catch the latest episode of the TechRadar podcast where we discuss the biggest Samsung news at CES.
Things are getting smarter
When Samsung bought SmartThings in 2014, the smart home was even more of a nebulous concept. Connected device technology was still burgeoning, the cost of smart devices was high and no one could really agree on how we’d actually end up interfacing with our smart homes, with the first Amazon smart speaker featuring Alexa being freshly introduced later in the same year.
Over the course of CES, I spoke with several senior executives at Samsung about the future of SmartThings; from Taeyoung Huh, Head of CX Offering Team to Jaeyeon Jung, Head of SmartThings Team, as well as Deborah Honig, Chief Customer Officer for Samsung Electronics UK, and one thing became clear: Samsung has huge plans for its wide range of products.
“We wanted our devices to make consumers’ lives easier and better, that’s been our vision all along. Following our acquisition of SmartThings in 2014, step by step we’re making this a reality,” explains Jung.
The South Korean tech giant historically keeps its options open when exploring new technologies, as Jung explained during our exclusive roundtable. “We keep innovating our hardware with new functions, and if you have to rely on someone else’s platform, you’re always behind. That’s not the way we innovate.
“Samsung has a wide range of portfolio products, and we want to provide great lifestyle experiences [across these devices],” she added; and by all accounts it sounds like the tech giant is ready to achieve this by unifying all of its many plate-spinning arms into one mega limb.
Connected devices are the future, but not just in the form of appliances and home furnishings. Instead, everything from wearables like the Samsung Galaxy Ring, Samsung Galaxy phones and the Samsung Galaxy SmartTag 2 will become a part of the connected home, with some exciting applications that could prove genuinely useful.
Tech-assisted living
Already, Samsung has packed its smart living features into devices across its product range. For instance, with a Samsung phone, you can approach SmartThings devices and a remote control widget will automatically appear. However Huh says there’s plenty more to come. As an example, he says features like Sleep Mode could connect to your smart ring to adjust devices around your home as you fall asleep, turning off distractions like LED indicator lights on air conditioning units or tweaking the settings on noisy appliances.
Or, devices like your Galaxy SmartTag could measure how much you’re walking your dog, giving breed-specific guidance on pet care and working in tandem with devices like the Samsung Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI robot vacuum to monitor your pets at home. However, none of these features are as yet unplanned for official release, meaning we’ve got even less of an idea how Matter-compatible devices might fit into the bigger picture.
With these new developments, new possibilities in tech-assisted living are unlocked – provided that a majority of your devices are made by Samsung. There are further benefits to decking out your home, according to Huh; he notes that increasing the number of Samsung smart devices in your SmartThings ecosystem could also build up your home security, with each acting as an additional node to the Blockchain-based Samsung Knox security system.
It’s a promising vision of the future of the smart home, and one that feels genuinely realistic for the coming years. Samsung’s screens-everywhere mantra means our homes could be filled with viable smart hubs, and its continued efforts to develop Galaxy AI and Bixby into genuinely useful assistive platforms make for stiff competition to the likes of Apple and Google, which are both lagging behind on the hardware front.
Grab your popcorn, because the smart-home wars are only just beginning. For now, at least, my bets are on Samsung to make the first viable whole-home smart device ecosystem, but I can’t wait to see how its biggest competitors respond in kind.
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TechRadar extensively covered this year's CES, bringing you all of the big announcements as they happened. Head over to our CES 2025 news page for the latest stories and our hands-on verdicts on everything from 8K TVs and foldable displays to new phones, laptops, smart home gadgets, and the latest in AI.
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