How Pepper Failed — SoftBank's $100M Emotional Robot That a Tablet Could Replace

Posted on Tue 09 June 2026 in AI Practice • Tagged with robotics, pepper, softbank, aldebaran, hardware-startups, failure-analysis, product-market-fit

In 2014, Masayoshi Son stood on a Tokyo stage and unveiled Pepper — a wide-eyed white humanoid he called the world's first robot that could read human emotions. He was not pitching a gadget. He was pitching a new era, one where SoftBank would lead the way as robots moved from …


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