Speaking today at his company’s fiscal year 2014 earnings report briefing in Tokyo, SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son revealed that Pepper, the telco’s personal humanoid robot, won’t be sold to consumers until later this summer. When Pepper was unveiled last June, Son stated that the robot would be sold to consumers in February 2015.
“We are going to sell Pepper to developers only in February,” Son told the audience. “We haven’t reached a final decision yet but that’s the direction we’re discussing now. We [recently] held a briefing session for developers and we received far more pre-orders than we expected. We’d like to focus on developers so that way by the time we ship to general consumers, we will have more applications for Pepper.”
Son, the richest man in Japan and a true believer in the future of robotics, said that Pepper will ship to general consumers in Japan “sometime between June and August.”
Pepper is also scheduled to go on sale at Sprint outlets in the US this summer. Son didn’t elaborate on potential changes to the robot’s US launch. Pepper will retail for JPY 198,000 (US$1,670) in Japan. Details of the US pricing have yet to be announced.
Despite Pepper’s delay, the so-called emotional robot will be getting an artificial intelligence boost thanks to a collaboration with IBM’s Jeopardy-playing cognitive computer “Watson.”
“[Regarding the] collaborative project with Watson and Pepper, we have started discussions with IBM, actually we have started testing,” Son announced. “Watson and Pepper will make an interesting combination. AI will be enhanced further by combining the advanced technologies of [both].”
Just last month, world-renowned entrepreneur Elon Musk plonked down US$10 million to ensure that artificial intelligence doesn’t go all Terminator on humanity. Bill Gates echoed Musk’s fears shortly thereafter. Son doesn’t seem terribly concerned.
“The singularity is coming,” he added. “It’s just a matter of time. When that happens, I hope the robots, AI, will be something good for mankind. We’re partially responsible for that future.”
See: SoftBank CEO: robots can reverse Japan’s economic decline
Editing by Mary-Anne Lee
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