Asia Pacific Telecom and Syntrend jointly announced the introduction of the Pepper robot, and the two companies are subsidiaries of Hon Hai. Pepper is being exhibited and performing in regularly scheduled daily retail shows.

Pepper will be introduced in Taiwan; however, it may not happen within the next year. Because Pepper is a product with a Japanese interface, it lacks a Chinese language interface and applications. Therefore, they will begin collaborations with Taiwan’s software development industry next year in order to develop peripheral applications and ecosystems for Pepper.

Lu Fangming gave a special “shadowboxing” performance with Pepper. The performance was not easy because Pepper is not equipped with an eye detection system; therefore, the engineers used Xbox360 Kinect software to simulate Lu Fangming’s movements before entering them into Pepper’s system.

Lu Fangming said that Pepper has many mechanisms for improvement, and in order to introduce Pepper into Taiwan, they will have to overcome the situation of not having enough network systems or applications.

Even so, he optimistically predicts that Pepper will gradually improve, and through a series of IoT and cloud collaborations its artificial intelligence will become closer to lifestyle necessities.

(TR/Phil Sweeney)