SoftBank Group halts Pepper robot assembly

SoftBank Group Corp. has suspended production of its Pepper robot, shelving for now a project Masayoshi Son once personally championed as a symbol of his conglomerate’s ambitions in AI and technology, Bloomberg reports.

The Japanese company halted assembly of the 198,000 yen (US$1,790) robot in August after inventory piled up, but may decide to resume production in future, a SoftBank spokeswoman said.

It’s now in discussions with its French robotics unit, which employs about 330 people, on potential job reductions, she said.

Reuters reported earlier, citing unidentified sources, that SoftBank plans to cut roughly 50 percent of those positions in France by September.

Pepper, SoftBank’s first foray into robotics, was marketed from 2014 as a home companion and store assistant.

Touted as the first machine endowed with emotions, the company marketed Pepper aggressively from the U.S. to Japan, promising the gadget was sophisticated enough for tasks usually handled by clerks, receptionists and translators.

While the robot was capable of expressing human-like body language, maintaining eye contact and engaging in limited small talk, it never caught on.

Now, it looks like Pepper -- assembled by Taiwanese iPhone-maker Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. -- is destined to join Honda Motor Co.’s soccer-playing ASIMO and Sony Group Corp.’s QRIO humanoids as the latest cool-but-impractical robot to come out of Japan.