There is something rather stressful, as you watch a five-year-old gaze adoringly into a pair of glowing eye sockets, about the world’s most entertaining robot.
Built to detect our human expressions and then exude its own mechanical versions of surprise, shyness and other emotions, it feels like a jump forward. After decades of disappointments, Japan’s robot-rich dreams are becoming more real.
Pepper, a puckish humanoid launched by SoftBank, the Japanese technology and telecoms group, and selling out as fast as Taiwan’s Foxconn can assemble it, allows Japan to justify (at a stretch) the claim that it is putting a functioning robot in the homes of ordinary people. Pepper reads stories and muses on them, it responds to events, it learns and it delights. It also, on occasion, freezes completely. But, while it is still at an early stage, it is impressive.