Meet Pepper, the First Personal Robot that Reads Emotions by Aldebaran Robotics

Hello everyone.

Sorry as I am a bit delayed in reporting this.

Photo from Aldebaran/Softbank

Meet Pepper, the new robot! At a first glance, its head rather look like NAO, don't you think? And he zips around on wheels.

What's so special about Pepper? First of all, it will be sold in the mass market soon for an affordable price of about USD 2,000 or ¥198,000. Aldebaran built the robot for SoftBank, the Japanese telecom giant. SoftBank Corporation will release Pepper in Japan early next year.

Most importantly, Pepper is a robot that can recognize human emotions and react accordingly.

According to a press statement by Aldebaran:

"Pepper is a humanoid robot that takes his surroundings into consideration to react pro-actively using proprietary algorithms. Pepper also comes equipped with capabilities and an interface that enables communication with people, including the latest voice recognition technology, superior joint technology to realize graceful gestures, and emotion recognition that analyzes expressions and voice tones. With these technologies, people can enjoy communicating with Pepper in a natural way, just like they would with friends and family. In addition, Pepper can make jokes, dance and amuse people thanks to a wide variety of entertainment capabilities, some of which were developed in cooperation with Yoshimoto Robotics Laboratory, Inc., a Yoshimoto Kogyo Group company. Capabilities that help Pepper evolve by learning through daily interactions with people are also being planned for the commercial launch timing."

These are Pepper's technical details:

Source: IEEE Spectrum

From the Youtube video below, it is mentioned that Pepper currently only understands Japanese. So the developers are looking into English language packs for Pepper.

Another important info: Aldebaran is now a SoftBank Group company, with SoftBank owning an 78.5% equity interest. Very interesting.

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