Expensive and dumb — Pepper has always been something of a novelty — exemplified best by the fact that the robot’s most public appearances have been at conferences, and standing in for ...

The 4-foot-tall robot is a product of Softbank Robotics America, a company that has donated robots to district high schools with computer science programs in Boston, San Francisco, and British ...

(Just as a quick aside, I don’t buy that Pepper actually reads emotions — no robot or computer vision system can do that. Hell, neither can I most of the time.) ...