Samsung is turning its kitchen appliances into AI assistants. The company announced today that it's bringing Google Gemini to its Bespoke AI refrigerators, microwaves, and ranges, marking the first time the LLM is being embedded directly into kitchen hardware. The move signals a major shift in how consumer appliances will handle everyday tasks, from food inventory to wine curation. Samsung will showcase these innovations at CES 2026 next month.
Samsung's partnership with Google is getting very real and very domestic. The company announced it will debut a new generation of AI-powered kitchen appliances at CES 2026, powered by Google Gemini and Google Cloud. This isn't just marketing speak about smart homes. Samsung is fundamentally rethinking what refrigerators and cooking appliances do by embedding actual generative AI capabilities into the hardware itself.
The centerpiece is the new Bespoke AI Refrigerator Family Hub. Previously, Samsung's vision system could recognize up to 37 types of fresh food and 50 pre-registered processed foods on-device. That's useful, but limited. The new Gemini-powered version removes those constraints. It can now recognize processed foods without requiring separate manual registration, automatically cataloging items as they're added. More impressively, it can detect foods stored in personal containers with user-applied labels, expanding what it can track exponentially.
"In pioneering the application of vision-based AI technology, Samsung has led innovation in the kitchen appliance market," Jeong Seung Moon, Executive Vice President and Head of R&D for Digital Appliances at Samsung Electronics, told the company in a prepared statement. "Samsung will reach a new level of innovation through this collaboration with Google Cloud and will utilize these ongoing initiatives to continue to deliver better consumer experiences in the upcoming year."
What's actually happening here is significant. Rather than relying on local recognition models trained on limited datasets, Samsung is leveraging Gemini's broader understanding of food, cooking, and kitchen management. This means the system gets smarter over time as Gemini's models improve, and it can handle edge cases that traditional computer vision would struggle with. The refrigerator essentially becomes a kitchen inventory manager that doesn't need constant human input.
But Samsung isn't stopping at groceries. The company is also introducing a new Bespoke AI Wine Cellar that uses the same Gemini-powered vision technology. When users add or remove wine bottles, a top-mounted camera recognizes the label and tracks inventory in real time through the SmartThings AI Wine Manager. The system knows which shelf and compartment each bottle occupies, eliminating the need to search manually. More useful still, it provides wine pairing suggestions based on what's actually in the collection, turning it into an AI sommelier for your home.
