SoftBank announces emotional robots to staff its stores and watch your baby

[petskup]

http://www.theverge.com/2014/6/5/5781628/softbank-announces-pepper-robot

[pandit]

that robo looks kinda cool

[lemfuture]

yes its here

[b!z]

Looks like an overpriced vacumn cleaner

[Este Nuno]

From the article:
"Perhaps the most notable element of Pepper is the price: it will go on general sale in February for ¥198,000, or around $1,930, for the base unit."

That actually seems a lot less expensive than what I would expect for this type of new tech. Most early adopter type stuff is pretty high priced.

I wonder how things this thing can actually do though.Or if it's more of just another piece of furniture that is mostly just for display.

[petskup]

The 121 centimeter (48 inch) tall, 28 kilogram (62 pound) white Pepper, which has no hair but two large doll-like eyes and a flat-panel display stuck on its chest, was developed jointly with Aldebaran Robotics, which produces autonomous humanoid robots.

Besides featuring the latest voice recognition, Pepper is loaded with more than a dozen sensors, including two touch sensors in its hands, three touch sensors on its head, and six laser sensors and three bumper sensors in its base.

It also has two cameras and four microphones on its head and has Wi-Fi and Ethernet networking capabilities.

In Thursday's demonstration, Pepper sang, "I want to be loved."

Pepper robot by aldebaran: 1st Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osD6O4LAcpo

[jmintuck]

I would LOVE to rent or borrow a Pepper and go to a coffee shop or pub and get a bit of attention and intro Pepper. This'd be interesting.

Danm, just like Star Wars-The Droids when I was a little kid in the 80's. Used to watch the hell outta that cartoon. IDK y The Droids from Star Wars enchanted me. Just the futurism really enchanted me;robots aka. droids and all sorts of futuristic stuff.

[oureptsC]

Firstly they look ok but they are far from being good enough to compare with real people. Personally I wouldn't really like If a robot like this would serve me in a restaurant or any other public place, I just wouldn't be comfortable with It because they are robots and they work on a program which would make their service really bad for customers , no emotions just ok, yes, bye and that's all. The price of this "pepper robot" seems to be very cheap I'm surprised. At the beginning these robots might have success because If some business man would start a restaurant only with robots like these a lot of tourist or just curious people would visit that restaurant but yes normal restaurants must be considered with real people and restaurant with robots only for entertainment.

[bitgeek]

Just one small step to sex robots
I agree I wouldn't feel comfortable too. Robots taking care of babies is also a bad Idea, their methodical movement and lack of real emotions may influence the child.

There was en experiment, years ago that proved small children need to be held and hugged to develop higher brain functions.

[DubFX]

Are we close to robot apocalypse if he will say "I want to kill"?

[bitgeek]

Are we close to robot apocalypse if he will say "I want to kill"?

For this to happen he'd need self-awareness. And this is really difficult, as machines operate on a set of commands and know only what they're taught to do. Some computers like the ones playing chess can learn from the player's movements and react, but they don't want to learn, they were programmed to do it.
A self learning machine that feels the need of improvement might be dangerous.

[Este Nuno]

Firstly they look ok but they are far from being good enough to compare with real people. Personally I wouldn't really like If a robot like this would serve me in a restaurant or any other public place, I just wouldn't be comfortable with It because they are robots and they work on a program which would make their service really bad for customers , no emotions just ok, yes, bye and that's all. The price of this "pepper robot" seems to be very cheap I'm surprised. At the beginning these robots might have success because If some business man would start a restaurant only with robots like these a lot of tourist or just curious people would visit that restaurant but yes normal restaurants must be considered with real people and restaurant with robots only for entertainment.

Eventually robot waiters will be the norm and you'll have to go out of your way to go to a special restaurant that has the classic style human wait staff. It will be a gimmick in the future, like going to one of those old diners that decorate like they're from the 50's.

None of this is guaranteed of course, but really if you think about how much money a $2000 robot can save a business compared to a full time employee it seems inevitable.

[petskup]

Pepper’s creators know they can’t program the robot to behave perfectly in all situations, so they wanted the robot to learn on its own. According to Son, the robots deployed at SoftBank stores will start collecting data on their interactions with people. When Pepper tells a joke, it will observe if people laugh, for example.

The robots will upload their data to a cloud-based repository. This “cloud AI,” as Son called it, will use the combined data to improve Pepper’s behavior. “The robot is going to evolve through this collective wisdom,” he said.

[Este Nuno]

Pepper’s creators know they can’t program the robot to behave perfectly in all situations, so they wanted the robot to learn on its own. According to Son, the robots deployed at SoftBank stores will start collecting data on their interactions with people. When Pepper tells a joke, it will observe if people laugh, for example.

The robots will upload their data to a cloud-based repository. This “cloud AI,” as Son called it, will use the combined data to improve Pepper’s behavior. “The robot is going to evolve through this collective wisdom,” he said.

That is pretty interesting. It reminds me of that movie "She". It's a movie about computer based AI in case anyone wasn't aware of it. It's pretty interesting.