Pepper the humanoid robot is so hot that he
sold out within a minute, according to his Japanese
creator, SoftBank Robotics Corp.
Only 1,000 models were available for the consumer
launch on Saturday in Japan . The base price was set at
¥198,000 ($1,600) with an additional ¥24,600 ($200)
monthly data and insurance fees.

Standing just under four feet tall, and weighing 61
pounds, Pepper is designed to read emotions as well as
recognize tones of voice and facial expressions in order
to interact with humans. But most of all, "he tries to
make you happy," Kaname Hayashi, Softbank's project
manager, told CNN last year.
With his array of cameras, touch sensors,
accelerometer and other sensors in his "endocrine-type
multi-layer neural network," Pepper has the ability to
read your emotions as well as develop his own. He
isn't a work robot, but more of an emotional
companion for people.

Pepper has his own evolving emotions which "are
influenced by people's facial expressions and words, as
well as his surroundings," according to SoftBank.
"Pepper is at ease when he is with people he knows,
happy when praised and scared when the lights go
down."
Developers admit that the robot may make mistakes,
but says Pepper will learn and grow over time through
his own emotional engine and collective wisdom gained
through collected cloud data.
Pepper currently has the ability to speak English,
French, Japanese and Spanish. In the next few months,
there will be more language releases in its app store,
which already has around 200 apps.

The business side of Pepper

Two days prior to Peppers initial limited release,
SoftBank announced a new partnership with the Apple
manufacturer Foxconn and the Chinese e-commerce
giant Alibaba, which each agreed to invest ¥14.5 billion
(over $118 million) for 20 percent shares in SoftBank
Robotics Holding. SoftBank envisions Pepper as a first
step in spreading robotics worldwide.

Softbank is willing to sell Pepper at a loss for the first
four years, but expect the robot to bring in profits by
the fifth year and become a major force in revenues 20
to 30 years in the future. Company officials stated that
they want to keep Pepper affordable, and compared the
price of the robot to that of a pet dog in Japan,
according to a press event held last week.
SoftBank also plans to launch "Pepper for Biz" in the
fall, making the robot available for businesses and will
announce details in July. Pepper has already been used
to sell Nestle coffee machines in Japanese stores.
Interested in buying your own Pepper robot? SoftBank
will be releasing information about additional sales on
their website in July.

edition.cnn.com/2015/06/22/tech/pepper-robot-sold-out/index.html

A robot that can read ones emotions.... Hmmmm the human being is very complex that he himself is yet to understand fully his emotions and abilities...hope the robot wld be able to decipher a false emotion

Hmmmn

iRobot.... here we go.

Reading human emotions doesn't make it emotional, as far as I am concern, it is not a new technology to read human emotion. The process is just detecting the increase/decrease in heart beat, changes in hormones etc as in lie detector. Making the robot to react base on the emotion is very simple, using a simple functions built on basic conditional statement. The hard thing is having to detect all these without having to touch the subject (sensor?)
I don't think it is possible for human to make an emotional robot because humans cannot understand or explains emotions eg. Love, Anger, Hate etc and as a 'mediocre' programmer, I can't tell you you cannot programme something don't understand.
Emotional robots is a science fiction.

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