Samsung's SmartThings to Revolutionize Smart Homes with AI-Powered Ambient Sensing

Samsung SmartThings appliances will soon work as motion sensors

Samsung recently held its highly anticipated Unpacked 2025 event, pulling back the curtain on the Galaxy S25 smartphone lineup. The event wasn't all about phones, however, as we also learned about plans to turn SmartThings appliances into motion sensors. Driving the change is Home AI -- a feature that'll gather insights from your daily habits to build personalized experiences to create a smarter smart home. Planned to roll out through 2025 and into 2026, Home AI is bringing ambient sensing to a variety of SmartThings devices. Doing this will allow the platform to understand how it can better serve you, as it'll monitor activities like cooking, exercising, and sleeping to gather important details about your lifestyle. Recommended Videos Samsung says SmartThings will eventually be able to provide real-time feedback, giving you reminders to stand up if you've been sitting for too long or recommendations on how to optimize your environment for your current activity. For example, it might give you guidance on your form during workouts or automatically dim the lights when you sit down for movie night. By better understanding movements and sounds within your home, SmartThings will be able to detect what's going on and actively make changes to your surroundings. It's a bold vision for the smart home, and one that does away with the need to issue voice commands or fiddle with clunky menus on your smartphone. Please enable Javascript to view this content Coinciding with Home AI is the new personalized Map View. This lets you create a detailed map of your home by taking pictures with your smartphone to better train SmartThings on what your space looks like. Once the platform has integrated these new details into its system, it'll better be able to perform automatic adjustments based on your activities, such as adjusting your lights and smart thermostats. Of course, privacy is a huge concern when collecting data on this scale, and Samsung says all information will be stored locally on your network. That means you won't have to worry about sending your data off to the cloud. Expect to learn more details in the coming months, including which devices will gain these motion-sensing abilities.

Samsung appliances are about to get smarter and wiser - thanks to AI

The new Home AI features on various SmartThings appliances leverage ambient sensors to suggest different routines throughout your day. Simplifying the smart home is no easy task, yet we smart home users are always striving to do it. At Samsung Unpacked 2025, the company unveiled new Home AI features for its SmartThings platform designed to simplify daily life. This is part of Samsung's initiative towards a more personalized, knowledge-based AI experience that can learn from your habits and apply this knowledge across multiple apps. Also: Everything announced at Samsung Unpacked 2025: Galaxy S25 Ultra, Gemini AI, more The new Home AI features will detect when someone is working out or sleeping, for example, to suggest different routines for the activity. So, if you always exercise with loud music and work in complete silence, it can suggest routines to automatically switch off the music while working at your desk. Alternatively, if your TV is on, but you've fallen asleep, it can switch off the TV and run your bedtime automations, like turning off your smart lights. This is part of what Samsung introduced as part of the Ambient Sensing Foundation Model. This vision uses advanced sensor technology, like occupancy, motion, and sound sensors, to identify what activities you're doing in your home and proactively create the perfect environment for each. Samsung will generate a 3D map of your home with Map View technology, and then it can identify which room or area you're occupying, depending on what the sensors capture. This adds a layer of user-specific customizations for tailored activities and routines with specific objects and during situations, all powered by generative AI. The personalized map lets users navigate their home layout in the SmartThings app and easily interact with their home and routine suggestions. Also: 5 exciting AI features that make the Samsung Galaxy S25 worth the upgrade Instead of using traditional smart sensors, Samsung plans to use millimeter-wave (mmWave) and sound sensors to capture more precise data. mmWave sensors can detect activity more accurately than other movement sensors, capable of discerning whether someone is sleeping, cooking, or moving. Of course, having sensors in your home to recognize what you're doing at all times sounds like a privacy nightmare. Samsung is emphasizing its focus on privacy by employing local data storage for all this information. This would address feelings of unease about vulnerabilities around cloud-based data storage, but many users may still feel apprehensive about the idea.

Samsung is giving SmartThings an AI upgrade to simplify your smart home routines

The new Home AI features will sense when you're working out or sleeping, for example, to suggest different routines for the activity. Here's how that would work. Simplifying the smart home is no easy task, yet we smart home users are always striving to do it. At Samsung Unpacked 2025, the company unveiled new Home AI features for its SmartThings platform designed to simplify daily life. This is part of Samsung's initiative towards a more personalized, knowledge-based AI experience that can learn from your habits and apply this knowledge across multiple apps. The new Home AI features will detect when someone is working out or sleeping, for example, to suggest different routines for the activity. For example, if you always exercise with loud music and work in complete silence, it can suggest routines to automatically switch off the music while working at your desk. Alternatively, if your TV is on but you've fallen asleep, it can switch off the TV and run your bedtime automations, like turning off your smart lights. Also: Everything announced at Samsung Unpacked 2025: Galaxy S25 Ultra, Gemini AI, more This is part of what Samsung introduced as part of the Ambient Sensing Foundation Model. This vision uses advanced sensor technology, like occupancy, motion, and sound sensors, to identify what activities you're doing in your home and proactively create the perfect environment for each. Samsung will generate a 3D map of your home with Map View technology, and then it can identify which room or area you're occupying, depending on what the sensors capture. This adds a layer of user-specific customizations for tailored activities and routines with specific objects and during situations, all powered by generative AI. The personalized map lets users navigate their home layout in the SmartThings app and easily interact with their home and routine suggestions. Instead of using traditional smart sensors, Samsung plans to use millimeter-wave (mmWave) and sound sensors to capture more precise data. mmWave sensors can detect activity more accurately than other movement sensors, capable of discerning whether someone is sleeping, cooking, or moving. Also: 5 exciting AI features that make the Samsung Galaxy S25 worth the upgrade Of course, having sensors in your home to recognize what you're doing at all times sounds like a privacy nightmare. Samsung is emphasizing its focus on privacy by employing local data storage for all this information. This would address feelings of unease about vulnerabilities around cloud-based data storage, but many users may still feel apprehensive about the idea.

Samsung's SmartThings to introduce AI features that simplify your daily routines | TechCrunch

On Wednesday, Samsung unveiled how SmartThings, its smart home platform, will introduce AI features that allow users to simplify their everyday life through ambient sensing technology and generative AI. At Samsung Unpacked 2025, the company said the upcoming "Home AI" features will gather insights from a user's everyday life to create personalized experiences. Samsung shared that SmartThings will use advanced sensor technology, like millimeter-wave (mmWave) and sound sensor devices in users homes, to understand customers' daily activities like cooking or sleeping and create the ideal environment. It's an ambitious vision. For instance, if a user is exercising, said Samsung, SmartThings will be able to detect which kind of exercise is being done and guide the person on their form. If a user is drying her hair, SmartThings will detect the sound and movement of the action and start that individual's robot vacuum to clean up stands that have fallen on the floor. Or, SmartThings' may activate a user's air purifier to remove allergens from the air after sensing the person's miniature pinscher jumping onto the couch. As for its generative AI technology, SmartThings will ostensibly have a deeper understanding of a user's home's environment, allowing for additional personalization. For instance, users will be able to take pictures of objects like chairs so that Samsung's Map View technology -- which allows someone to create a 3D map of their home to find and operate the different devices there -- can enable more intuitive interactions. SmartThings might adjust a user's lighting or temperature settings based on their proximity to certain areas or objects, for example. The company says all information will be stored locally on a user's network, and that none of a person's data will be stored in the cloud or accessible to third parties without that individual's consent. Samsung says these updates will rollout throughout 2025 and 2026.

What is Samsung's ambient sensing? Unpacking the new SmartThings AI features

During Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked 2025 event, its SmartThings division unveiled new AI technology that could be set to supercharge the smart-home experience - provided that you have a Samsung-based ecosystem, that is. The new tools will fall under the banner of Samsung's Home AI, and include 'ambient sensing', a feature that gathers insights from connected devices around your home and adapts to your everyday life to make your smart home more efficient. We don't have a confirmed release date yet, other than a broad 2025-2026 rollout window, which means there's plenty of time to kit your smart home out with SmartThings-enabled hardware; just bear in mind that it's likely most features will be exclusive to Samsung's devices, at least in the short term. Here are the answers to all your burning questions... Chief among these new developments is ambient sensing, whereby SmartThings devices will be able to leverage advanced sensor technology such as motion and sound detection to monitor your daily activities and create the perfect environment for every moment. Many of Samsung's devices feature such sensors, from the new Bespoke JetBot Combo AI robot vacuum to Samsung's large appliances and the Samsung Music Frame, meaning you just might already have a few devices in your home that will benefit from the new ambient sensor technology. Samsung provided a few examples of what its ambient sensing technology will be capable of: So what might this look like in practice? For example, while you're working out, Samsung says SmartThings will be able to detect which kind of exercise you're doing, offering guidance on your form and giving recommendations for how to up your gains by changing the length of exercise. If you've just hopped in the shower, the sound and motion made as you dry your hair could trigger your robot vacuum to collect any hair you shed in the process, or create a more ambient mood as you approach your favorite reading chair by switching on the nearby lamp and adjusting the room's temperature. Or, if you've got a particularly fluffy friend at home that emits wafts of fur as it jumps up on furniture, SmartThings could even recognize this and activate your air purifier to remove allergens from the air. Indeed, it's a development I discussed with a number of executives at CES 2025, though I couldn't quite get a sense for how soon these features might manifest; now I know, and I'm delighted that it's set to happen so much sooner than I'd anticipated. The fun doesn't stop there; SmartThings is also set to upgrade its AI Home arsenal with Generative AI technology, namely by adding further personalization to your Map View. Now, Samsung says you'll be able to use your phone camera to capture images of furnishings around your home to make Map View more accurate to your styling. That in turn means you'll have a better user experience when it comes to navigating around and interacting with your smart home, as Map View will know where your furniture is, and be capable of leveraging the new ambient sensing technology based on proximity. The short answer is, Samsung says, yes. The longer answer is that Samsung will store all information locally on your network, offering privacy by keeping the data within Samsung's appliances and devices instead of being dependent on the cloud. That means, Samsung says, that your data won't be accessible to third parties without your consent. Samsung is, frankly, light years ahead of its smart home competition, owing to its combination of wide-ranging product categories across home and lifestyle devices, its worldwide popularity, and its various partnerships with the likes of Google for its AI tools as well as its collaboration with the Connectivity Standards Alliance on Matter. Samsung is, frankly, light years ahead of its smart home competition, owing to its combination of wide-ranging product categories across home and lifestyle devices, its worldwide popularity, and its various partnerships with the likes of Google for its AI tools as well as its collaboration with the Connectivity Standards Alliance on Matter. Samsung is, frankly, light years ahead of its smart home competition, owing to its combination of wide-ranging product categories across home and lifestyle devices, its worldwide popularity, and its various partnerships with the likes of Google for its AI tools as well as its collaboration with the Connectivity Standards Alliance on Matter.