Introduction
On June 19, 2015, the Japanese electronics major SoftBank
Corp announced its partnership with Chinese online shopping giant Alibaba and
electronics supplier Foxconn Technologies to jointly market humanoid robot
Pepper across the world. Subsequent to its launch, it is being used in Japan as
a babysitter, party companions or medical worker. Outside Japan, it is going to
be given to the overseas customers from June 20, 2015. Each of these Roberts is going to hit the
shelves in the online retail market with a price tag of 198000 yen or $1610.54.
The conglomerate currently handles mobile phone and Interest business in the
region. Through this business, the conglomerate wants to become a number one
company in the robotics field and shore up the advantages of the early bird in
this business.
Launching of Worldwide Sale of Robot Pepper
The robot maker SoftBank has teamed up with the online
shopping company Alibaba and electronic supplier Foxconn Technologies to sell
its new humanoid product Pepper in the worldwide market. The joint venture has chosen
to charge monthly and insurance fees apart from the cost. Excluding the other
bills, it is going to cost somewhere in the range of 198000 yen. Currently, the
robot Pepper is being manufactured at the facility owned by Foxconn
Technologies in Japan. The Japanese conglomerate envisions their robot to serve
in various capacities in various situations. However, the sales on the large
scale require a large backup. That is
the reason why three companies across various verticals have come together and
raise the corpus to fund the marketing and sales of these humanoid robots.
About 60% of the corpus would be given by SoftBank and rest 40% is equally
shared by other two partner companies. Foxconn Technologies and Alibaba are
investing 14.5 billion yen or $117.94 million each to raise the amount.
Important Features of Robot Pepper
It is a wait-high robot with a human-like appeal. It is
designed to quickly learn and express human feelings and interact with them
accordingly. It tries to use the natural language to interact with the human
handlers. It even makes the right guess when it sees the emotions of people
with whom it interacts. For this purpose, the robot follows an advanced
algorithm that lets the robot to understand the emotion and the mental state of
the people before it. Currently, it is being used at the mobile phone shops owned
by the company SoftBank.
