<div><em>Toshiba’s shop girl, Aiko Chihira, a robot, moves about the shop floor, interacts with customers, and talks quite sweetly</em><br><br>Your next best friend could be a piece a chatty chunk of metal and tech The human race’s attempts to recreate itself in metal and tech is unstoppable. Robots aren’t just intended for cleaning windows or taking on monotonous tasks in factories that people get bored with or replacing humans for dangerous jobs. They’re made to delight kids, take care of the elderly when they have no one else, and even read the news when it’s too late for people to be up.</div><div> </div><div>Just recently, the Japanese took their fascination for robots up a notch with the launch of Toshiba’s shop girl, Aiko Chihira. She moves about the shop floor, interacts with customers, and talks quite sweetly. She’s very human – and yet isn’t. She’s a robot who’s going to man (or should that be robot) the information desk at a Tokyo store and help customers find their way about and get what they want. All are movements are startlingly people-like and you’d be tempted to makesmall talk with her – but that may be going too far. Chihira is going to be working at Mitsubishi among other places but someday, there could obviously be plenty of her kith and kin working around the world, say at airports, to guide people across increasingly complex spaces or at hospitals, to do some basic tasks.</div><div> </div><div><img alt="" src="http://bw-image.s3.amazonaws.com/mala.jpg" style="width: 200px; height: 200px; float: right; margin: 1px;">Exciting, but at the same time someone’s going to be done out of a job. But now here’s a robot that doesn’t look human – he looks like a robot– but behaves like a person. Pepper, developed by Softbank, is incessantly chatty, demands to be called cute, and avoids difficult questions. It’s a glossy white saucer-eyed four-footer that seems willing to chat all day. And it’s a bit cheeky, so people are immediately amused and start to chat with it – or him. It looks like it’s been designed to keep chatting and seems to like human company.</div><div> </div><div>But the chatting isn’t one-way. You reply and all its sensors and cameras are trained on you noticing your body language and responding accordingly. In other words, it’s supposed to be understanding human feelings though it’s also a bit thick skinned and does what it likes mostly.</div><div> </div><div>Now Pepper is actually becoming commercially available as of nowthough it costs $1,600 and will also have a service fee of $200. Softbank is starting with 1,000 Peppers and it will only be available in limited countries for now, but you can see where this is going.</div><div> </div><div>Robots like Pepper are not just a lab experiment any more. Pepper could be used for just about anything you develop it to work with. It’s as cute as R2D2 and kids are extremely charmed by the creature, so it could be used for teaching things that are readily gamified. It could be used, like Chihira, to help customers. Or just make it a member of the family. Pepper even likes and responds tobeing patted on the head.</div>
BW Reporters
Mala Bhargava has been writing on technology well before the advent of internet in Indians and before CDs made their way into computers. Mala writes on technology, social media, startups and fitness. A trained psychologist, she claims that her understanding of psychology helps her understand the human side of technology.
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