The Cutest Robot Ever Just Wants to Make You Happy

Screenshot: SoftBank Group

A new robot was revealed today in Japan, and it’s just the most adorable thing. “Pepper,” made by SoftBank (known mainly as a telecoms company), is literally designed to make you happy.

According to SoftBank, Pepper is the “world’s first personal robot that can read emotions.” He (it’s impossible not to personify this humanoid cutie) can use voice recognition and tone analysis to communicate with people in a more natural fashion than your usual function-oriented bot or, indeed, previous “caring” robots. He makes love-bot Kenji look ancient.

But even before you get on to the interaction, one of the most arresting things about Pepper’s performance is how cleanly he moves, as you can see in this video of the conference. His gestures are so smooth, it looks like a (very small) person wearing a robot suit. He makes pleasingly infantile noises—“Weeeee!”, “Brrrrr!”—and has a touch of Wall-E’s EVE in his shiny white casing. He owes more than a little to the much-loved Nao robot, which is probably to be expected considering the company that made Nao, Aldebaran Robotics, collaborated on the project.

Granted, it’s difficult to tell how much work went into that little show, and how well Pepper can actually react off-the-cuff. The little video above gives a bit more of an insight into how the robot is programmed to move and respond to its human buddies. As well as the touch screen on his chest, he’s got two cameras and a 3D sensor, four microphones, and three touch sensors just on his head, with additional sensors on his chest, hands, and “legs” (more like a kind of plinth on castors).

Despite acting in quite an astonishingly human way, he somehow manages to avoid the “uncanny valley” creepiness with his non-threatening demeanour. In a statement, SoftBank Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son said the idea was to develop “affectionate robots that make people smile,” and Pepper’s tricks are said to include making jokes, dancing and generally amusing people. He apparently learns from interactions with the public, and uploads that knowledge to a cloud-based AI to develop emotional knowledge. 

So what’s he supposed to be—a pet? A friend? A family member? A therapist? As a personal robot, I guess he’s whatever you want him to be. From next February he’ll be on general sale in Japan for the equivalent of under $2,000—which is pretty impressive considering you can pay three times that for an animatronic seal pup.

With recent advances in emotional tech, it was only so long before robots started to develop their version of emotional sensitivity. Let’s just hope we don’t get too attached.