Pepper, a 121-cm tall plastic robot from Japanese telecom company SoftBank, is getting ready to hit the world stage. Masayoshi Son, the founder and chairman of SoftBank, said Thursday that his company is working with China’s Alibaba Group Holding and Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group to build a framework by year end to bring Pepper and other robots to the global market, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
Pepper is billed as an emotional robot that can act as a companion for the elderly, a teacher of school children, or a retail assistant. The robot, designed by SoftBank’s French subsidiary Aldebaran Robotics, can recognize human voices, read facial expressions and body language, and carry on conversations.
According to Alexander Martin writing in the Journal, “Alibaba and Foxconn will both invest ¥14.5 billion to each take a 20% stake in SoftBank subsidiary SoftBank Robotics Holdings Corp. SoftBank will own the remainder.” Foxconn will begin producing 1,000 robots per month with the first 1,000 available to consumers June 20. Developers have been offered 500 of the robots to encourage app development. One app developed so far—Ninnin Pepper—converses with dementia patients to stimulate their memory and reminds them to take their medication, communicating via the Internet with a doctor to report on compliance.
Martin quotes Yasuko Akutsu, president of MT Health Care Design Research Inc. and a member of the app’s project team, as saying, “I believe there is a significant business opportunity for robots like Pepper in an aging nation with an increasing number of dementia patients.”
Other emotional robots in the works include Huggable, Autom, and Jibo, which I have covered in an earlier post.