India, Sept. 30 -- There was a time, not too long ago, when the idea of home appliances that could think for themselves, and for you, felt like science fiction. Sci-fi movies showed refrigerators that knew the households' grocery lists, and TVs that spoke back, and listened to the owners. For most of us, it was fantasyland, sometime in the future. A few days ago, standing inside Samsung's flagship store in Mumbai's famed Bandra-Kurla Complex, the distance between sci-fi imagination and reality suddenly felt constricted, abridged, and narrow.

Future Living, Now," the Korean phone and home appliances giant demonstrated how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can now allow control of several devices, both personal, and home-related, from a single ...