Masayoshi Son, CEO of SoftBank, presents Pepper with Aldebaran founder Bruno Maisonnier and Foxconn chairman Terry Gou, outlining their plans for an emotion-aware personal robot at a Tokyo press event.
Son introduces Pepper as a robot designed to recognize and respond to human emotions. In a live demonstration, Pepper describes its directional microphones, distance sensing, and smile assessment, while trading jokes with Son. Son says the robot’s central role is to care for people.
Son contrasts conventional computing with his vision of robots that learn emotional responses and act to support people. He describes a cloud system that combines household-specific learning with shared lessons from many robots, while prioritizing privacy and recording emotionally significant moments more heavily. His examples include encouraging a child to read and helping a family celebrate a birthday.
Son announces a planned February consumer launch at a base price of 198,000 yen, following deployments in SoftBank stores. Pepper is designed for more than 12 hours of operation, with stable wheeled movement instead of walking on two legs. SoftBank plans a developer SDK and a cloud service through Cocoro SB; Son says costs may fall and profitability may come with mass production.
Bruno Maisonnier describes Pepper as a companion built to make daily interactions with technology more natural. He says its emotional engine uses facial expression, gesture, and vocal tone alongside speech recognition, while expressive movement and application downloads support interaction and ongoing development. He invites developers to use Aldebaran’s NAOqi system and attend a September developer conference.
In the press Q&A, Son says much of the launch demonstration followed prepared applications, though emotion recognition was already working in specific settings. He says open-ended store conversations would use AI and add learning to the cloud, but could still fail to reach a complete exchange. Son estimates word recognition at 70 to 80 percent and says emotion recognition was not yet connected to cloud-based free conversation.
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