Anyone who has stood in entrance of a fridge with arms stuffed with groceries or tried to tug out damp laundry lengthy after a wash cycle has seemingly wished for a serving to hand to open the door. In response, Samsung Electronics launched the Auto Open Door characteristic in 2021 — beginning with easy touch-to-open performance for fridges.
▲ The Bespoke AI Family Hub fridge opens with a light-weight contact.
Today, Auto Open Door is accessible throughout a variety of home equipment, together with fridges, ovens, washing machines, dryers and dishwashers.1
Washer-dryers and dishwashers open robotically on the finish of a cycle for higher hygiene and extra comfort. The 2025 Bespoke AI Laundry Combo goes additional, including air circulation to scale back as much as 40%2 of leftover moisture within the drum after washing.
Starting this 12 months, customers don’t even must say “Hi Bixby” to activate Auto Open Door — a easy command like “Open the fridge door” is sufficient.
Samsung Newsroom spoke with Nae-young Park from the Washing Machine Module Lab, Digital Appliances (DA) Business, and Chang-Woo Han from the AI Solution Team, Samsung Research at Samsung Electronics to find out how the characteristic got here to life.
▲ (From left) Nae-young Park and Chang-Woo Han
Q. What impressed the event of Auto Open Door?
Park: When placing groceries into the fridge or loading laundry into the washer, customers typically needed to set down what they have been carrying simply to open the door. With washing machines, leaving laundry inside after a cycle might result in lingering moisture and musty odors. We developed this characteristic to ease these inconveniences whereas additionally contemplating hygiene.
Q. What facets did you concentrate on most throughout growth?
Park: We thought-about a number of elements, together with opening angle and velocity, to ensure the door opened in a secure, pure approach. Angles have been examined in one-degree increments, and the construction was fine-tuned to create an expertise that didn’t really feel too sluggish or too quick. For washing machines, we even measured oxygen focus at completely different door angles to search out the optimum setting for easy air circulation — successfully decreasing residual moisture within the drum.
Q. How was the voice-activated door-opening characteristic designed to work with out calling Bixby?
Han: Because the system needed to acknowledge instructions and not using a wake-up phrase, it wanted to stay in standby and reply shortly. That required balancing vitality effectivity with responsiveness, utilizing low-power, low-latency know-how. To obtain this, we carried out low-power key phrase detection and on-device computerized speech recognition (ASR) — detecting the person’s voice, figuring out phrases like “Open the fridge door” and utilizing on-device ASR to precisely interpret and execute the command.
Q. What efforts went into making the voice recognition know-how secure and environment friendly?
Han: High-quality voice recognition depends upon precisely understanding a wide range of instructions and requires giant quantities of recorded voice knowledge. Since amassing that knowledge manually is time-consuming and resource-intensive, we developed zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS)3 know-how to streamline the method. Zero-shot TTS can synthesize required sentences in many alternative voices and use them for coaching. We superior the know-how to the purpose the place it may possibly exchange fashions skilled on actual human voices.
Q. What is the longer term growth route for Auto Open Door?
Park: Looking forward, Auto Open Door shall be expanded to extra merchandise. We wish to equip a broader vary of home equipment with this know-how so customers can work together with any Samsung equipment naturally. Our purpose is to create options that make life simpler for everybody, no matter their bodily situation or circumstance.
Han: This 12 months, we launched new voice recognition capabilities resembling Voice ID — which distinguishes between household…
