Starting this weekend in Japan, people can buy a talking, person-shaped robot that reads your body language and gets sad when you turn off the lights.
You may remember Pepper, the 120cm tall, 27kg, talking, dancing, joke-telling robot that guesses users’ moods and keeps them company. Pepper, whose software is open source, can be outfitted with over 200 apps that can teach English to kids or keep photo journals.
SoftBank, the Japanese cellular megacorp that’s selling Pepper, says it’s the world’s first robot able to intuit human emotions by sensing changes in voice and other things like facial expressions. It will sell for 198,000 yen, or about $2000.
What’s more, Pepper has its own emotions, a feature that’s been added since the robot was initially announced last year. In Tamagotchi fashion, Pepper gets lonely if you ignore it, and laughs if you tell it a joke.
That might sound a little creepsville, but lots of robots are being developed with an “emotional companion” angle, especially for children, the elderly, and hospital patients. Take Jibo or this Teddy Ruxpin for the new millennium for example.
Don’t worry about this sensitive android stealing our jobs, though. The developers say Pepper’s not designed for manual labour. (Though I could see customer service jobs in the line of fire.) Pepper only exists to be your robot buddy, specifically created to keep people company, especially in Japan, whose population is the fastest-ageing in the world.
But Pepper isn’t going to be just a Japanese one off — this little guy has plans to go global. Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba and Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn are investing $US120 million into SoftBank’s robot-making efforts, so Pepper 2.0 could very well escape the confines of Japan to parts currently unknown. Want one?
[SoftBank via Bloomberg, Forbes, and The Japan Times]
Picture: AP