Production stop for the Pepper household robot
The telecom giant Softbank stops producing the humanoid Pepper. The Japanese household robot was launched in 2014 and has since been used in everything from retirement homes to banks.
Pepper communicates with emotional expression, body language and through speech. It hears the tone of voice if its owner is angry or sad. It can also both sing and make a joke. This is how Ny Teknik wrote back in 2014 about the humanoid, which was developed by the French company Aldebaran.
That Softbank stops producing Pepper is due to the telecom giant’s cuts in the industrial sector. In France alone, Softbank will halve the number of employees from the current 330 people. It states Reuters.
Too expensive to resume production
Sources to Reuters claim that Pepper, which was contracted by Foxconn in China, stopped production already last year and that it would be too expensive to resume production.
French Aldebaran was acquired by Softbank in 2012, and sources claim that the cultural clashes that have occurred between Japan and France have had a negative effect on the development of the robot.
A total of 27,000 robots were produced and one explanation for the low sales figures is that Pepper had some instability in its functionality.
