|
Ever feel like no one really understands you? Well "Pepper" could be about to change all that. That's because Pepper is actually a robot and touted as the world's first with the ability to read emotions. The humanoid robot -- which looks slightly like a shrunken Michelin Man -- was unveiled to curious onlookers in Tokyo stores on Friday by SoftBank, a Japanese telecom giant and Aldebaran, a French robotics company. Pepper doesn't look much like its name. Standing under four-feet tall with a tablet computer mounted to its chest, it has human-like hands and a mermaid-like lower torso — though its toddler-like voice seems incongruous with this state-of-the-art facade. Despite the high-pitched voice, Pepper is able to converse about everything from the weather, to more sophisticated topics like the latest fluctuations in the stock markets. Yet the great differentiator is the fact Pepper is fully interactive, making eye contact when meeting people. Pepper is "the first robot to read human emotions," said Softbank's CEO Masayoshi Son told reporters at a press conference in the Japanese capital on Thursday. "Robots like Pepper are adding a new dimension in our daily lives. They would change it with the same magnitude as the PC, Internet and mobile phones did." How Pepper reads your moods Using its emotion recognition functions, Pepper can react to people in its vicinity -- making jokes, dancing and even rapping (in Japanese), as it did in an onstage demonstration on Thursday. | 
