SoftBank opens 'robo cafe' at Tokyo stores

Ha-ha. We might as well need a playful spirit without being serious to communicate with the robot like this at least for the time being.

No thank you. I prefer to interact with humans, face to face.

I don't need to be entertained while waiting hours at Softbank stores. I need these employees to do their job at a stellar pace to get people moved along. Train the human robots there to work faster, and train the real robots to solve the issue or reason I'm there - not amuse me.

Given that it takes 30 minutes to get the simplest of things done in a Softbank store, they should've been offering free coffees a long time ago - robot or no

i interact with a pepper 3 times a week at a care home. it doesn't recognise me and doesn't speak english. if you want to make robots, they have to be good-looking and multicultural. otherwise the world will be full of ugly people who speak only one language like me.

Good stuff, hopefully they can do more than serve coffee though. Surely they could be configured to help out with fairly minor inquiries. The wait times at Softbank stores are already approaching farce so I would easily prefer a robot if it sped things up

By recognizing faces this robot is a few steps ahead of most convenience store workers who can mechanically repeat the same phrases but seem not to recognize steady customers.

When I enter a business, I want to be greeted by and interface with a human being, not so cheap robot that the business uses to increase its profits. Technology can improve some things in life, but we need to be very selective about what we chose to use. Personally, I find television useless, and haven't owned one - or a car mobile phone in over 12 years. Want more retail customers? Dump the robots; hire and train more people.

SoftBank has recently acquired Boston Dynamics, hope they will start making some real robots, not this iPad on the wheels

The robot can recognize different human faces with a system developed by Microsoft Corp capable of detecting 27 spots on a human face

It's part of a mass surveillance programme.

If deployed in public, overall accuracy will be lower since most Japanese like to wear surgical face masks when out in public.

What's the point of the gimmicky robot contraption, all you need is the iPad.

The answers in the final sentence:

The robot can recognize different human faces with a system developed by Microsoft Corp capable of detecting 27 spots on a human face.

It's part of a mass surveillance programme.

I did TEAP interview examinations yesterday, which I'm frighteningly sure these robots could have done.