If you have ever paused a film to look up where it was shot, Samsung wants the television itself to answer that. Samsung Vision AI Companion, the AI layer built into its TVs, has moved past its limited launch and is rolling out to more countries and more sets, with a refreshed interface that puts the AI on the home screen instead of burying it in a menu.
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What Samsung Vision AI Companion actually does
Vision AI Companion (VAC) is Samsung's own AI platform for televisions, not a phone assistant stretched onto a bigger screen. It handles three jobs: answering questions about what is on screen, finding content through ordinary conversation, and summarising the day's news and sport so the viewer does not have to go hunting for it.
Conversational search is the part most people will notice first. Instead of reaching for a phone mid-movie, viewers can ask about the film they are watching and get the answer on the TV, then jump straight to related videos from that result. Content discovery works the same way. Rather than typing an exact title with a remote, a viewer can describe a mood, an actor or a plot point, and the system reads the intent behind the request.
The May update added Today's Topic, which uses AI to summarise top news, lifestyle updates and sports highlights on screen and recommends videos tied to each. Samsung also introduced what it calls a zero-depth interface, where topic-based conversations sit directly on the home screen, so reaching the AI features no longer means moving between screens.
Why the wider rollout matters
VAC was previously available in 38 countries. Samsung has since extended it worldwide, excluding a short list of markets (Belarus, China, Cuba, Iran, Russia and Syria), and widened support to more TV models. That is the difference between a flagship talking point and a feature ordinary buyers actually get.
Donghee Han, from the experience planning group in Samsung's Visual Display business, framed the design constraint plainly in an interview with Samsung Newsroom. "Because TV is designed primarily for viewing content on a large screen, AI interactions must be seamlessly connected to what is on screen without disrupting that experience," he said.
Samsung also says the team worked with its legal department from the earliest stages on copyright, privacy and data-use rules before features shipped, a slower path than the release cadence elsewhere in consumer AI. For a device that sits in the living room and listens for a wake word, that is a reasonable trade.
The fine print worth reading
- Voice commands are recognised in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian and Korean. Not every accent and dialect is supported.
- Availability, supported features and the interface vary by country, region and model.
- Some models need a Bluetooth remote, sold separately. The feature is reached with the AI button, or a long press of the Home button on remotes without one.
- Results are AI-generated and accuracy is not guaranteed, so treat answers as a starting point rather than a fact-check.
Takeaway
Samsung has not published Malaysian pricing or a local model list tied to the expanded rollout, so the practical question for buyers here is which set in the current line-up carries it. The direction, though, is clear: the remote is becoming less of a keyboard and more of a microphone, and the TV is expected to understand what you are looking at.