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1,000 Pepper Robots Sell Out in a Minute on Launch Day
A story from ITWorld [itworld.com]:
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.
