Pepper — SoftBank's Humanoid Sold on the Promise of Reading Emotions

Pepper is a humanoid robot that SoftBank Mobile unveiled on 5 June 2014. It was developed jointly with France's Aldebaran Robotics, and the announcement billed it as "the world's first personal robot that can read emotions". The "world's first" is SoftBank's claim. From the next day it greeted customers at SoftBank's Omotesando and Ginza stores; 300 developer units went on sale on 27 February 2015, and general sales began on 20 June 2015.

The body cost 198,000 yen before tax. Buying online, however, required 36-month subscriptions to both a monthly basic plan and an insurance pack. The 1,000 units set aside for June sold out one minute after orders opened.

From unveiling to sale

The February 2015 launch originally announced turned into a developer pre-release, and general sales slipped to the summer. In February, K-tai Watch reported that further sales were planned for around summer 2015.

The machine

SoftBank's announcement listed these planned specifications.

Unlike ASIMO or Atlas, Pepper did not walk on two legs. It set a human-like upper body on a wheeled base and put its effort not into walking but into facing people and talking to them.

According to PC Watch, Foxconn handled manufacturing, and its chief Terry Gou attended the unveiling. Aldebaran's founder Bruno Maisonnier, whose company the SoftBank Group had invested in, was involved in the development.

Selling emotion

What Pepper sold was not its specifications but emotion. SoftBank said Pepper could gauge people's feelings from their facial expressions and tone of voice, and at the unveiling it scored Masayoshi Son's smile. Emotional data learned by each robot was to be pooled in a cloud database and shared with other Pepper units, and a company to run that data, Cocoro SB, was announced. In the release Son said: "Using emotion engines and Cloud AI, which evolves with collective wisdom, we're making this happen."

A year later, SoftBank's Japanese release of 18 June 2015 announcing general sales was headed with a new phrase: a personal robot that, as a world first, has emotions of its own. From a robot that reads people's emotions to one that has its own — both were the company's claims, not capabilities verified by anyone outside.

The pricing: a cheap body, paid off monthly

General-sale pricing, all before tax:

Online buyers had to sign up for both the basic plan and the insurance pack, so the three-year total far exceeded the price of the body. Even so, when orders opened at 10 a.m. on 20 June the 1,000 June units were gone in a minute, and orders for another 1,000 opened on 31 July. The June release also announced a business model, Pepper for Biz, for that autumn.

On the same day, 18 June, SoftBank announced that Alibaba and Foxconn would each invest 14.5 billion yen in the intermediate holding company for its robotics business, leaving SoftBank with 60 percent and each partner with 20. The three said they would take Pepper to global markets.

Production stops

On 28 June 2021 Reuters, citing sources and documents, reported that Pepper production had stopped the previous year. According to one source, only about 27,000 units were built. Three sources said limited functionality and unreliability had hurt sales. Reuters also reported plans to cut about half of 330 positions at the robotics unit in France.

Bloomberg reported the next day, in a story carried by Fortune, that assembly had halted in August as inventory piled up, and a SoftBank spokeswoman said production might resume in future. In a follow-up on 21 July, Reuters reported, citing documents, that production at a Foxconn plant in China had stopped the previous year and that SoftBank had fewer than 2,000 Pepper units left.

In the same period SoftBank also owned another humanoid maker: Boston Dynamics came under SoftBank in 2017 and moved to Hyundai Motor Group in 2021 (see the Atlas article).

For the wider history of humanoids, see the humanoid and AI robots timeline.