Before the smart home concept achieved the massive, headlines-grabbing ubiquity it enjoys today, automating one’s living space was strictly the domain of the technically astute… or the wizards among us. Then came Samsung’s SmartThings, offering a user-friendly, brilliantly organised method for taming the chaos of the smart home.

Suddenly, connected devices — lights, shades, robot vacuums, thermostats, and security cameras — which serve to make a home safer and more convenient, became rather entertaining. Throw into the mix the washing machine, refrigerator, television, and all the significant consumer gadgets residing in a house, and the ecosystem expands properly. The revolutionary quality of SmartThings continues to gather serious momentum, a reality we experienced first-hand during a recent visit to Samsung’s global headquarters in Suwon, South Korea.

Samsung AI Home is built on experiences that are cohesive across categories. Galaxy AI, on your devices and wearables fuels on-the-go productivity and wellness, Vision AI brings natural language interaction and smart recommendations to your TV, and Bespoke AI appliances take the guesswork out of household chores

Into a connected world

Suwon serves as a brilliant example of a locale where cutting-edge technology and human relations exist in happy symbiosis. It is as much home to the historic Hwaseong Fortress as it is to trendy cafés, ‘clucking’ good Korean fried chicken, and a youthful demographic that remains perpetually surfing the cutting edge of new technology.

Few places are driving technological evolution faster than Suwon. Located approximately 70 minutes south of the capital city, Seoul, this is the research and development heartbeat of Samsung Electronics. The twofold advantage Samsung enjoys globally is best observed here: A boundless faith in the digital future combined with a laser focus on what the living environment will look like five or 10 years down the road.

“We are innovating so that appliances adapt to people’s lifestyles. Turning technology into products involves a lot of trials,” said Jay Yoon, VP and head of the Refrigerator R&D Group at Samsung Electronics, during our meeting at the HQ.

There is a camera inside the refrigerator to track what's stored inside

Samsung’s vision of the smart home diverges drastically from that of competitors. Many homes currently have smart devices scattered haphazardly throughout the space like confetti. The smartphone usually connects them all. For Samsung, its Galaxy smartphones remain crucial, but with a clever twist: The company’s telly can serve as a hub just as effectively as its refrigerator.

The smart home strategy in Suwon offers a proper eye-opener regarding the technology’s future. Picture this: After packing the children off to school, parents depart for work. Automatically, using geo-fencing technology, a Samsung cleaner like the Jet Bot+ wakes up and commences its daily tasks. All gadgets in the house recognise that it is an empty nest, allowing for the optimal use of power. When you are a few kilometres away from such a smart home, the devices swing into action. The TV can display the specific information you seek — such as the latest news, sports scores, or new film releases — and update you regarding security alerts from your cameras.

The company occupies a unique position as a leader not just in smartphones, but also in home appliances like refrigerators and washers. By integrating the home connectivity hub directly into appliances consumers are already purchasing, the sci-fi dream of the smart home is finally coming to fruition. Furthermore, there are AI models working their magic in the fridges, washing machines, and nearly every other device from the company.

A display like no other

Seeing a display on a refrigerator is far from a gimmick. The screen, or ‘flex’, takes the centrepiece in kitchens, moving beyond the simple cooling system. Now, combine this with a camera inside the refrigerator, and things get clever. First, the machine can track every ingredient you are removing or inserting. Even if it takes mere seconds to retrieve a couple of bottles of fruit juice, the camera is speedy enough to gather the data. There are instances where a cauliflower might go in alongside a lettuce. The camera can decode the ingredients and offer visuals on the screen.

This leads us to the bigger picture behind placing a large screen on the refrigerator. If there is spring onion, chicken pieces, capsicum, baby corn, and condiments like oyster sauce, soya sauce, and perhaps chilli sauce, the refrigerator can play chef and suggest a curated list of recipes.

Cameras inside the refrigerator also significantly reduce wastage. We have all pushed condiments and ingredients towards the back, where they are lost for weeks, until the time is ripe for a gross scrub-down. The software Samsung offers keeps track of expiration dates to ensure everything stays fresh (users should confirm and set the use-by date by themselves).

These screens are not the basic, sluggish touch control panels many devices now sport. These are high-quality displays that might even find a place on an Android tablet. Besides controlling the appliance, the screen can run full apps as well as perform tasks like controlling music and displaying the weather. This exercise reduces dependency on smartphones. Usually, picking up the phone to perform one task translates into doomscrolling social media for minutes, if not an hour.

AI Energy Mode helps control your home’s energy use, optimizing devices to save power and lower your bills. Seen here, the inside of a top-end Samsung washing machine

The “screens everywhere” approach has helped integrate AI into every other gadget, bringing to life the vision of technology working in the background to assist with your daily life.

Such is the importance of SmartThings that the company continues to invest heavily in it. Launched in 2012-13, it was developed by Alex Hawkinson, who had suffered extensive damage to his family’s cabin when a frozen water pipe burst, flooding the basement. Had he been aware of the issue, he could have prevented it. The experience compelled him to work on the technology, which Samsung acquired in 2014. The SmartThings platform now boasts 370 million users and has been growing at about 20 per cent annually over the past three years.

The pandemic acted as a massive catalyst for the popularity of SmartThings. With people remaining indoors during the early months of the crisis, they became excited about smart devices, reimagining what homes could be like and how they could make them better.

As appliances like refrigerators and washing machines now deal with more options, controlling them from a crisp screen rather than with fiddly knobs is markedly easier.

The SmartThings play also takes into consideration that multiple appliances are situated in different areas of the home. Managing tasks across multiple devices can waste time, but the screen resolves these issues by acting as a central control hub that seamlessly connects the home’s appliances. You can control the home environment from wherever you are. For example, refrigerators with AI Vision Inside can suggest recipes on the screen and automatically set the optimal temperature and cooking time for the oven. Or consider the washing machine, which can now show plenty of information, including water and detergent usage and energy reports.

“Refrigerators, for example, run 24x7, so energy efficiency is important. There are many expectations from the product — storage capacity, storing food in fresher states — and to meet expectations, we introduced the Peltier module,” said Yoon.

We ask a great deal of refrigerators. No other household appliance is expected to run 24 hours a day while maintaining sub-zero temperatures. Yet, the company is managing to tweak design elements enough to move into a sophisticated phase. It has reached a stage where design insight drives technology application. For instance, a refined understanding of the Peltier chip helped the tech team completely rework the internal architecture.

Earlier this year, Samsung Electronics announced it had, with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, published a paper in the journal Nature Communications regarding the world’s first high-performance Peltier refrigerator using nano thin-film tech.

Peltier devices achieve cooling via the Peltier effect, in which applying an electric current to a semiconductor causes one side to cool and the other to heat. As it requires no refrigerants, this method is gaining traction as a next-generation alternative that offers a lower-impact solution.

The current hybrid refrigerator sold by Samsung uses both Peltier and the traditional compressor for cooling, and there is refrigerant. This thin-film Peltier surpasses the cooling efficiency of traditional vapour compression refrigerators, creating potential for the commercialisation of next-generation refrigerators without refrigerants.

AI and beyond

The potential of AI Home screens, while offering access to the SmartThings hub, can extend beyond Samsung products. The company has been an active voice for Thread networks, a wireless smart home protocol designed for low-power devices such as door locks, lights, and sensors, which is utilised by the Matter smart home standard.

With Matter, companies realised it was better to play nice together rather than sit in separate, siloed ecosystems. It means you can, for example, answer a video doorbell from the fridge. An alternative way of interacting with your smart home, without carrying your phone everywhere or relying on voice control, is now a reality.

The definition of the smart home has changed dramatically in the span of a few years. If the early days were about how to get a device connected and which platform was the most flexible for bringing together varied protocols, now it is about how a company can make a difference to the user experience in a crowded market. It is about having a real impact — on cooking, taking care of pets, managing energy usage, and even locking the doors at night.

Equally interesting is the way Samsung is deploying artificial intelligence across its ecosystem, be it the washing machine, fridge, or vacuum cleaners. Naturally, Galaxy phones and smartwatches possess it too.

Bespoke AI is the secret sauce, and it was sprinkled throughout our many conversations at the company’s Suwon offices.

Though we are still some way from AI picking up your clothes and placing them into the washing machine for you, the technology can ensure that the clothes you wash receive the best clean possible. Samsung’s Bespoke AI laundry range comes with AI Wash. This feature detects the weight of the load along with the type of fabric. It also detects how soiled the fabric is to adjust the amount of water and detergent used, as well as changing soaking, rinsing, and spinning times.

AI Wash’s sensors can determine how much detergent was used in the last few wash cycles, adjusting how much is released in the subsequent cycles. It results in optimising the detergent on each wash. And if you are looking for savings, AI Energy Mode is your friend. When you connect your Bespoke AI washing machine to SmartThings, you can activate AI Energy Mode. This can help reduce energy consumption by as much as 70 per cent.

Bespoke AI is also aiding the vacuum cleaner lineup. Samsung’s Bespoke AI Jet Ultra vacuum is among the world’s most powerful cordless stick vacuums, providing up to 400W of suction power in Jet Mode. But the real power lies with AI Optimum Tech, which classifies the different surfaces you are vacuuming, then adjusts settings like suction power and brush speed to provide the best possible clean. And it is not just about cleaning: AI Cleaning Mode 2.0 can help reduce how much battery power you use and make the vacuum cleaner more manoeuvrable.

But innovation has not stopped on the hardware front. How can homes be smart if a company does not have localised strategies for its appliances? Samsung plays this game well.

Indian users have been appreciating the South Korean company’s Curd Maestro tech that can handle the fermentation and storage of curd. Koreans, too, have something special — a refrigerator for their beloved kimchi. In Korea, traditionally, kimchi jars were stored in the ground to maintain constant temperatures, as the taste and texture of kimchi can change with even slight fluctuations in temperature. Samsung’s offering can achieve this with an extremely small margin of error. In the US, the Beverage Centre is a significant feature. Instead of having a water dispenser on the outside of a fridge, Samsung moved it behind a thin door. They then added a station to hold a water pitcher that automatically refills itself every time you use it.

Meanwhile, the number of AI-driven appliance models evolved from about 300 at the end of 2024 to more than 1,030 by March. Keeping it company is Bixby, Samsung’s voice assistant, which is being applied across the entire Bespoke AI lineup. Its growing presence allows users to control appliances by voice alone, offering a hands-free experience that lowers barriers to use.

There was a time when the idea of owning a smart home resided with folks with deep pockets. That is changing. There is now the ability to add one appliance at a time.

India is on course to surpass one billion 5G subscriptions by 2031, according to the latest edition of Ericsson’s Mobility Report, reflecting one of the fastest-growing mobile technology transitions anywhere in the world. The report predicts that by the end of that year, 79 per cent of mobile users in the country will be on 5G, marking a dramatic shift away from 4G within a decade of the new network’s launch. It means an immense opportunity for smart homes.

Smart home technology holds the promise of changing people’s daily lives and helping families communicate, while also controlling energy use. In the driver’s seat is Samsung, changing one room, one home at a time.