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In Japan, a new robot - the Pepper Robot - went on sale on Saturday (20 Jun), but the demand was a bit more than they expected:
The mobile carrier said 1,000 units of the household robot sold out in one minute on Saturday, its first day of consumer sales. The humanoid machine is designed to be a personal robot and a member of the family. It can’t do housework, but it can converse, recognize people’s emotions, develop its own “feelings” and retrieve information from the Internet such as messages and weather forecasts. SoftBank describes Pepper as the world’s first personal robot that has its own emotions.
Most of the Peppers were purchased online Saturday, but 30 units were ordered through a drawing held Friday at a SoftBank shop in Tokyo. No information about the first buyers was available, a SoftBank spokesman said.
The company plans to make more Peppers available in July.
Designed by SoftBank group company Aldebaran Robotics of France, Pepper has a raft of sensors and cloud-based artificial intelligence chops. It’s cheap compared to other robots of comparable sophistication, but it’s still a major purchase—it costs ¥198,000 (US$1,600) plus ¥24,600 in monthly data and insurance fees.
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by schad on Monday June 22 2015, @03:06PM
It was a reference to the TV show Futurama, and, somewhat humorously, you've unknowingly predicted much of the episode.
The plot is that Fry, one of the main characters and who was frozen for 1000 years, discovers he can download celebrity personalities to a blank robot and then make out with them. His (non-frozen) peers are horrified at his behavior; there is a strong taboo against sex with robots. They show him a campy educational film which includes the scene quoted. It's later revealed that the celeb personalities are actually unauthorized copies made from actual celeb heads, kept preserved in jars (heads in jars is a common theme in Futurama). So the rest of the story is around shutting down all the pirated copies of Fry's favorite celeb's personality -- Lucy Liu-bots -- and wrecking the operation that was doing it.
You really got it so on-the-head that it took until your last paragraph before I realized that you didn't actually catch the reference.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by VLM on Monday June 22 2015, @03:11PM
Yeah I never watch that show, too predictable. Seriously.