OREANDA-NEWS. October 12, 2016.  The four-foot tall robot whirling around the new offices of SoftBank Robotics America could well be your big-box store greeter of the near future.

“Hi, I’m Pepper,” says the sentient hunk of whirling white plastic and blinking lights. “Can I help you?”

That remains to be seen. Robots don’t necessarily bring out the warm-and-fuzzy in humans. Pepper hopes to change that.

“We designed Pepper to create empathy,” says Steve Carlin, SoftBank Robotics America vice president in charge of sales and development. USA TODAY was the first media outlet to visit the company's new base of robotics operations, home to 40 sales execs and engineers.

You may have read about Pepper over the past months. Its Japanese parent company has been trotting out the \\$2,000 device to a variety of technology confabs – from the Consumer Electronics Show to Oracle Open World – in anticipation of making it available to U.S. retailers later in the year. On Thursday, Carlin will speak about the coming age of robots at the Techweek conference in New York.

This ongoing roadshow has a targeted mission: to woo clients, intrigue developers and educate consumers.

"A robot for business is a hard problem to solve," says Ken Goldberg, who runs the People and Robots Initiative at the University of California at Berkeley.

"On the one hand, you can see this being really useful if you've ever gone to a big store and looked around to find no help," he says. "On the other, will it really be a substitute for a (human) greeter? There's the possibility that the novelty could wear off if it doesn't have a really compelling personality."

Japanese consumers have been interacting with some 10,000 Pepper units deployed over the past year, getting smartphone guidance at SoftBank’s stores, coffee tips at Nescafe shops and automobile specs in Nissan showrooms. In France, Pepper has been helping Carrefour shoppers select wine since last fall. And in Taiwan, Pepper works in banks where it leads employees on morning stretch routines.

At present, Pepper gets its smarts by connecting to IBM Watson, IBM's artificial intelligence platform, and Microsoft Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing service. Carlin says SoftBank is in conversations with other providers that he wouldn’t name. The biggest cloud service by far is Amazon Web Services, with 30% of the global cloud market.

As for our shores, the idea is that Pepper would act as a concierge, helping with everything from locating products to bathroom directions. With a body and arms that can move in 17 directions and a head filled with sensors and doe-like eyes that are accented by colored lights, Pepper aims to deconstruct the cold-and-calculating robot stereotype.

Pepper robots dispatched to a few Japanese homes have been programmed to read bedtime stories to children and teach languages to adults. In fact, a number of companies are betting that consumers worldwide will want a robot friend.

Anki, maker of a popular line of thinking racing cars and trucks, introduced Cozmo in June, a palm-sized \\$179 tractor-like robot that senses its surroundings and can read your expressions.

NXROBO currently is running a successful Kickstarter campaign for its BIG-I, a \\$799 robot in the shape of a domed garbage can that is able to relay messages to family members and warn you about incoming weather.

And automaker Toyota recently unveiled its pint-sized Kirobo Mini, a social-interaction robot that is meant to keep humans company with its casual banter.

Carlin says SoftBank’s plan for bringing Pepper does not include targeting the home. Beyond the fact that we may not quite be ready for such companionship, there’s also the issue of cost. The pricey robot also requires a monthly fee to cover repairs or replacement as well as software support.

Another way to think about Pepper is as an Amazon Echo with a rotating head, shimmying torso and waving arms. Amazon’s hot-selling cylindrical cylinder – which will be joined in the market soon by Google Home — has gone a long way to making people comfortable with asking questions of a piece of metal or plastic.

But Pepper, in contrast, demands eye contact. In fact, once it locks onto you, the robot will track your moment with its head and body. Pepper will even give you a fist bump. The idea is to achieve the most life-like level of interaction so as to encourage communication with this vaguely humanoid bundle of sonar, lasers and other sensors.

“We’ve given Pepper a number of cues that will help people understand what it’s doing,” says SoftBank’s Omar Abdelwahed, head of the company’s robotics studio. "It can even detect whether you're happy or sad by whether you're smiling or not. It'll even give you cues to signal it doesn't understand you."

That's handy because, in an extended demo, Pepper had a bit of trouble making out what its human questioner was asking. (Pepper's language processing skills come via Nuance, the same software that powers Siri.)

Pepper is quick to say it doesn't understand, and it will even strike a puzzled pose — head slightly bowed as the right hand touches its chin — which covers for the fact that its searching the cloud for an answer. Think of it as a less shiny version of Star Wars' C-3PO.

Much like Apple's iPhone came to life only after developers created apps to exploit the new smartphone's capabilities, making Pepper more useful and versatile will be down to the work of programmers. To that end, Abdelwahed says SoftBank Robotics is making the case to the community that early adopters will stand to make the most money once the hardware becomes ubiquitous.

"Most of the thousands of people working on Pepper applications using our open source code are folks who are just excited about robotics, even if there isn't much money to be made right now because there's no ecosystem yet," he says. "Pepper needs an app store."

If, for the sake of argument, Pepper and other robots race into the mainstream much as smartphones have done, there's the looming threat of job displacement. Gone is the senior citizen opting for another job in retirement, in comes his robot replacement.

Not to worry — for now at least, says Goldberg. "Our fear of robots is deeply rooted, think of everything from Frankenstein to the Terminator," he says. "But the truth is all this is likely to roll out very slowly. If anything, robots could really help in areas where humans aren't so good."

Not surprisingly, Carlin agrees.

“This isn’t about replacing humans with robots, but rather replacing low-level tasks like telling where the bathrooms are, or providing information in situations when human to human interactions can be tense, like at a car dealership," he says.

Carlin adds that robots could prove particularly helpful in the medical field. He cites the example of a robot explaining how an MRI scan works to a patient who is hesitant to bother a doctor, or patiently answering the same questions posed by patients with dementia where even a dedicated relative would get frustrated.

Other applications include gaming (Pepper could be your chess opponent) and translation services (in hotels and transportation hubs).

"The key here is for people to understand robots," says Carlin. "They're not creepy."