Samsung Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI review: a great robovac that will be even greater with software fixes

Samsung Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI: two-minute review

Samsung has come out swinging with its Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI robot vacuum and mop. It comes packed with cutting-edge, onboard intelligence tech for navigation, obstacle detection and identification, as well as some upgraded hardware and a self-cleaning base station.

I’ve been eagerly awaiting the Samsung Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI ever since it was first announced, hoping its highly commended on-board intelligence might provide a serious challenge to the likes of iRobot.

Having tested the robot vacuum for three weeks on a variety of floor types and against a litany of obstacles and messes, I, unfortunately, don’t think it’s quite the best robot vacuum on the market – though I do think it has the potential to shake things up.

I actually had to call in a second unit for review, as the issues I had with the original unit I tested (randomly dropping and abandoning its mop pads, not being able to detect them in the cleaning station, navigation issues and refusing to let me access the live monitoring, being among the most problematic). Largely, I couldn’t replicate these issues in my replacement model, so definitely do reach out to Samsung if you spot any major problems after purchasing. My review below reflects my experience with the second, replacement model.

The Samsung Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI’s greatest enemy is its own software, with some in-app faults and missing features that lead to a frustrating user experience and unfinished cleans (although, in fairness, throughout my testing, many of these bugs seemed to resolve themselves). My overall impression was that of a fairly accomplished, albeit occasionally buggy, robot vacuum that can deliver a competent clean despite slightly lower-than-average suction power for its price point. That’s not to say it’s lacking in power, mind you – it’s still very much capable, and performed fairly well in both its vacuuming and mopping tests.

What you’re really paying for is Samsung’s on-board intelligence and native compatibility with the wider SmartThings ecosystem, which is a real boon if you own some of Samsung’s large appliances and other home products. This sucker’s smarts are pretty impressive, especially when it comes to object avoidance, mapping and value-adding features like pet and home monitoring – though unfortunately, my second review unit still wouldn’t let me use this feature in iOS.

It’s hard to settle on a score for the Samsung Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI. If I was to judge on raw potential, assuming every software feature was behaving properly, I’d say it was a brilliant robot vacuum, with its only real weaknesses being its suction power and edge cleaning. However, the difficulties I’ve had with software have been a little off-putting. Still, it’s worth highlighting that throughout my testing many of these bugs have been fixed, and I imagine the remaining issues will continue to be ironed out. Read on for my full Samsung Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI review.

Samsung Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI review: price & availability

• List price: $1,699.99 / £1,299
• Launched: July 2024

Samsung’s Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI robot vacuum sells for $1,699.99 / £1,299, and is available directly from Samsung as well as third-party retailers like Amazon. Even though that’s very much in the premium price bracket, it’s actually more affordable than I’d expect – in the UK at least – for a combination robot vacuum and mop with so many next-generation features. Compare this price to, for example, the Roomba Combo 10 Max, which launched in August 2024 at a list price of $1,399 / £1,499.

It’s unfortunately quite pricey in the US right now, but it does offer some attractive features above and beyond much of its competition, such as mop pad steam sterilization, stain detection, pet care and a roller brush featuring Samsung’s patented Hair Grinder technology. It also offers great specs, as well as easy integration into SmartThings ecosystems – and even onboard Bixby functionality.

Samsung often runs some pretty appealing deals, and especially during major sales events. However, I wouldn’t put money on this particular robovac featuring in the 2024 winter sales, given how close its release date is to the start of the Black Friday sales.

• Value for money score: 3.5 out of 5

Samsung Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI specs

Samsung Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI review: design

• Modern, minimalist and sophisticated design
• Rather a large dock with water tanks and dust bin
• Camera isn’t recessed, risking damage

Clad in all-greige, the Samsung Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI and its self-emptying, self-cleaning base make for a modern and slick-looking package that keeps things simple with its design.

On top of the vacuum is the dToF (direct time of flight) LiDAR scanner, a raised ovoid that increases the height of the robovac by 0.6 inches / 15mm, as well as two touch controls. The first commands the vacuum to return to its base, and the other begins or pauses its cleaning cycle. These are only really necessary in an emergency where you don’t have your phone or a smart home controller handy. You can lift the rear half of the robot vacuum to reveal the onboard dust bin, reset button and the QR code you’ll use for setup. It’s unlikely you’ll need to remove the dust bin unless there’s something stuck, given the clean station automatically empties dirt when the robovac docks.

The front of the Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI houses its two 3D depth cameras and its main camera, as well as the built-in microphone for controlling Bixby and detecting sounds around the home. It’s worth highlighting these are all active by default, and the vacuum won’t work without the cameras, so for those privacy-conscious users, you’ll need to manually switch off the microphone. There’s also a status light indicator on the top of the robovac’s face, as well as another smaller light strip below the camera to help the robot illuminate dark spaces.

On the rear of the vacuum you’ll find the chutes for emptying the water and dust bins, and on its underside are the roller brush, side brush, two circular mop pads and its wheels. The roller brush is secured with an easily removable casing and is made of plastic with coiling rubber wings and soft brushes. The mop pads are fabric and attach magnetically to the robot vacuum. However, unfortunately after just a few uses, the right rondel magnet on my first review unit jammed, abandoning a mop pad mid-clean. Thankfully, simply replacing the mop pad in the cleaning station and commanding the robot vacuum to clean its pads seemed to fix the issue.

When in use, the mop pads can rotate at 170rpm. Overall, I prefer this rotating mop solution over the static mop pad strips found in many Roomba and Roborock devices – the latter can’t polish out tough stains as well as rotating rondels can.

To avoid cross-contamination and stinky carpet, the robot vacuum will intelligently lift them when transitioning from hard floors to carpets, or, if you’re not mopping at all, the vacuum will discard its mop pads into the base. The latter is a pretty rare feature, but a welcome one, if you want to remove all danger of damp carpets.

The Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI’s side brush is made from individual bristles rather than the rubber material found in many robot vacuums. Personally, I prefer this, finding bristles far less prone to flicking debris. However, they are far more easily damaged and tangled with hair, especially on wet floors after the vacuum has made its mopping rounds. The side brush does not extend to reach tougher spots, but the vacuum is, broadly speaking, intelligent enough to hunt down any wayward messes.

This robovac is also equipped with cliff sensors, surface detectors, stain detectors, and dirt detectors, which it uses to intelligently navigate and thoroughly clean your home without damaging any surfaces.

The dock is a bit of a behemoth at 17.5 x 21.5 x 20.1″ / 44.4 x 54.7 x 51 cm, but given that it’s basically the robot vacuum equivalent of a car wash, I can understand why. It houses three containers; an 88oz / 2.5L dust bin, a 106oz / 3L water tank and a 127oz / 3.6L dirty water tank in the main body of the base, from which the robot vacuum is emptied and refilled when docked. These are easily removed: simply grip the lid, pull them out, and unclip the tank’s lid to empty or refill the water tanks, or remove the lid and slide out the full dust bag.

The vacuum itself ascends a small ramp into a neat little alcove in the dock, at the base of which are the washing plates. After a mopping session, the base station will steam clean the mop pads with high-pressure steam, before drying them with hot air. On the rear of the base you’ll find the port for the power supply, which is 59 inches / 1.5m long. You’ll need to clear as much space as possible to the sides of the machine to ensure the robovac’s navigation is unhindered.

Samsung Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI review: performance

• Let down by app software
• Decent suction, excellent mopping
• Obstacle detection and onboard intelligence are great

Samsung’s Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI positions itself as a high-spec, high-performance automated home cleaner, but does it fit the bill? Well, kind of – with some software updates, it certainly would, but at the moment it’s slightly impeded by its beautiful-looking but semi-functional in-app experience and dodgy mop pad connectors.

Once paired, I was very impressed by the app’s design and wide array of features, which I’ll talk a little more about later in the review, but I was less pleased with the default settings. For some reason, the robot vacuum by default is set to continually clean until it runs out of battery, which led to an admittedly hilarious but confusing first clean for me. I always run my standardized pickup tests in the smallest room in my home, and asked the Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI to just clean that 6.5 x 6.5-foot / 2x2m space. Two hours of solid cleaning later, I realized something was up.

For the avoidance of hilarity/frustration, I’d definitely recommend poring through Samsung’s extensive list of settings and options before your first clean. Otherwise, the robovac’s first pass around my home to map the layout was broadly a success, with the app creating a fairly accurate floor plan.

Onto vacuuming performance. The Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI isn’t the most powerful sucker on the market, offering 6,000Pa of suction. Today’s most powerful models can achieve almost double that (for example, the Deebot T30S Combo has 11,000Pa on max mode, $1,199.99 or about £950 / AU$1,800). In contrast, Samsung’s robot vacuum sits in the comfortable mid-range overall, and while its pricing doesn’t necessarily reflect that, its onboard intelligence carries the brunt of the value.

Despite this lower suction, it delivers a great clean. A litany of onboard sensors help the vacuum not only to identify different floor types and obstacles but also spot dirtier areas – whether that’s due to stains and spillages or dust and debris – and adjust its cleaning accordingly. The Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI will also lift and lower its mop pads based on the surface area it’s cleaning, which I found worked perfectly throughout my testing.

I sprinkled cornflour on my hard floors and low-pile carpet to see how well the Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI could pick up fine debris, treading in some of it to create more real-world scenarios. On hard flooring, the Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI performed well, collecting a majority of the fine powder. On carpet, however, with its first pass, Samsung’s newest robovac didn’t really impress me, leaving about 80% of the cornflour on the carpet, even when the machine amped up its suction to tackle the issue.

However, it’s a stubborn bot with solid dirt detection technology, and throughout the rest of its clean returned to the fine powder to have another go. After about three attempts during one cleaning job, it did manage to clean up a vast majority of the powder, leaving roughly 20% behind.

On the other hand, the oats I sprinkled to test larger debris pickup on hard flooring were almost entirely suctioned by the robot vacuum in its first pass, including some of the grains closer to the obstacles I had set up for the vacuum to avoid. Thicker-pile carpets present more of a challenge; my rug was left with a fair amount of large and fine debris still in situ.

Its bristled side brushes are far superior to the more commonly utilized rubber side brush arms, at least in my opinion, and proved very efficient at sweeping lighter debris straight into the mouth of the robot vacuum. However, they don’t offer a great edge clean. It would have been good to see Samsung incorporate an extending side arm to help in this area – a feature offered by a few rival models in this premium price bracket.

As for the hair-grinding technology, I was fairly impressed, but not quite awestruck by the Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI. Samsung promises an 880% improvement compared to “a brush without a hair grinder” based on its internal testing, but it’s worth highlighting we don’t know enough about the brush it was compared to validate that claim, and it really is quite the claim.

That being said, I was very pleased with how few of my long hairs tangled around the roller’s brushes. They did, however, wrap around the midsection of the roller (which is usually covered by its casing and therefore wouldn’t impact the cleaning), and my hair also made a right mess of the side brush, leaving some of the brush strands permanently bent out of place. For pet owners, however, I imagine the Samsung Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI could just be one of the best robot vacuums for pet hair, as shorter hair is far less likely to tangle up either brush.

The onboard dust bin is a little small, so expect your vacuum to regularly empty itself at the base if you’re cleaning larger spaces or dealing with higher levels of dirt and debris – thankfully, the battery life is above average for its price, so that will save some time from the cleaning cycle.

On the other hand, the Samsung Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI’s mopping performance is most impressive, with its rotating rondels making quick work of wet spills (coffee), dry spills (also coffee) and sticky spills (dried fruit juice). Plus, thanks to the bot’s stain detection, there was scarcely a mark left on my floors after it made its rounds – although the dried-on and sticky spills did take a few laps. Once the robovac has completed its cleaning mission, it returns to the base to have its mop pads steamed, removed, and dried in a two hour-long cycle that leaves them good as new.

I was very impressed with the Samsung Jet Bot AI Combo’s navigation system, which deftly avoided all obstacles while still making its way into and around some tight spots to give the most thorough clean it could muster. That includes the fake dog poop I placed on the floor; pet owners will be pleased to learn that this robovac never so much as nudged it. When you first map your home, however, it’s important to have floors as clear as possible, as the bot will assume even the smallest obstacle is, in fact, a wall.

Its onboard intelligence can identify a variety of household objects (though Samsung doesn’t seem to list these anywhere), both in terms of obstacles and furnishings, which proved to be impressively accurate when I checked in the app.

Object avoidance is a real highlight for the Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI. As well as identifying the obstacle, it’s pretty clever when it comes to cleaning around it, managing to poke itself in and around non-hazardous obstacles like the cable and sock I left on my multicolored carpet. Broadly speaking, it was capable of recognizing each specific obstacle, though it did repeatedly identify a non-existent plate on my floor. I guess the local ghosts are having a tea party without me…

• Performance score: 4 out of 5

Samsung Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI review: app

• Managed through the very well-designed Samsung SmartThings app
• Lots of customization options, but a few too many bugs at time of writing
• Samsung Bixby voice assistant built in, but no list of supported commands

This presents a good opportunity to pivot to discussing the app, which is a bit of a beautiful mess. I’ve tested a fair few robot vacuums, but Samsung’s SmartThings app is by far the best designed and offers plenty of easy ways to set up your robovac and customize it just to your liking. That is, of course, provided the in-app features are working, and as of writing this review, many of them aren’t.

Let’s start with the positives. You can also take more control of your cleaning by adjusting the in-app settings, manually selecting the suction power, cleaning type, driving mode, and water level to ensure your floors are sparkling by the time the Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI is done. For instance, you might prefer that your robovac cleans the main part of the room then the edges (or the ‘walls’ as they’re referred to in the Samsung app), or vice versa, or instead focus on quick cleaning in a zig-zag fashion. You can also opt for vacuuming and mopping to occur simultaneously, or instead ask the bot to vacuum first, then come back to mop the room.

Using the map function, you can also set specific settings for different rooms, identify key pieces of furniture and adjust how the vacuum approaches these, highlight areas where the vacuum may need to breach a raised surface and set up no-go zones. When I first began my testing, sometimes editing the map at all would cause it to crash, but thankfully as of writing, it seems to have been fixed. It will, however, room-shame you if you have a smaller area you want to zone – such is the case with my kitchen, which the app won’t recognize as a room.

You can also download extension packages to the app to allow pet monitoring and more advanced smart home features. The pet monitoring in particular is pretty useful, allowing you to hunt down your furry friends remotely, instruct the bot to listen out for barks and even play calming music to assuage rowdy pups. I tried this using recordings of dogs barking, which worked well, but when I forgot to switch off the pet detection mode, it continued to alert me that my ‘dog’ was barking for hours every night.

Similarly, you can program the Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI to monitor your home or family when you’re away. There’s an area in-app where you can also manually control your robot vacuum and view a live stream, too, but in my experience, this works very sporadically at least on iOS, and rarely when you’re dialing in on a different Wi-Fi network or using mobile data.

Samsung’s Bixby voice assistant is also built into the Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI, meaning you can command your robovac with relative ease. There’s no list of commands provided, so it’s a little hit or miss whether it will understand your instructions. I found being very direct and simple with my wording helped massively, though I’d probably sooner use the app than my voice.

Should you buy the Samsung Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI?

Buy it if…

Don’t buy it if…

How I tested the Samsung Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI

• I used this as my main vacuum for 3 weeks
• I tested all the different modes and features
• I ran specific cleaning tests using different types of spillages

For my Samsung Bespoke Jet Bot Combo AI review, I used the device as my main vacuum cleaner for three weeks in order to assess how it lives up to its specs and marketing, including its suction power, mopping capability and onboard intelligence.

I tested various substances and stains (cornflour, oats, dried-on and wet messes) as well as obstacles (socks, bags, wires) to see how well its AI features detect and treat different obstacles, and also used the app to try its various intelligent features like home and pet monitoring.

For comparison, I used my experience testing robot vacuums like the iRobot Roomba Combo J7+ and other TechRadar reviews to judge how well it lives up to its price tag and Samsung’s own claims about its performance.

Read more about how we test

First reviewed October 2024