Lu Fang-ming, chairman of Asia Pacific Telecom Co., one of Taiwan's telecom services providers, revealed yesterday that Pepper robot will be available in Taiwan this Q3. In addition, the business version will be unveiled first and then the household robot will come later in 2017.

"Pepper" robots, the first humanoid robot, is jointly developed by Japanese telecom giant SoftBank Corp. and Taiwanese-based manufacturer Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. two years ago. A initial batch of "Pepper" sold out in Japan in just one minute after going on sale last year.

Lu pointed out that Hon Hai plans to joint venture with its partners to set up a robot company. The new company aims at the area of Pepper cloud platform and Asia Pacific, which is a subsidiary of Hon Hai, will be responsible for the marketing channel.

He also said that Asia Pacific has cooperated with many APP development companies to develop add-on application for Pepper. The first stage will release three to five kinds of business-oriented APP to apply in stores, showrooms and finance branches.