assignment

Pepper Pepper is a semihumanoid robot manufactured by SoftBank Robotics that can understand human emotions. A screen is located on its chest. It can identify frowning, tone of voice, smiling, and user actions such as the angle of a person’s head and crossed fingers. This way Pepper can determine if a person’s mood is good or bad. Pepper can walk autonomously, recognize individuals, and can even lift their mood through its conversation. Pepper has a height of 120 cms (about 4 feet). It has three directional wheels attached, enabling it to move all around the place. It can tilt its head and move its arms and fingers and is equipped with two high-definition cameras to understand the environment. Because of its anticollision functionalities, Pepper reduces unexpected collisions and can recognize humans as well as obstacles nearby. It can also remember human faces and accepts smartphone and card payments. Pepper supports commands in Japanese, English, and Chinese. Pepper is deployed in service industries as well as homes. It has several advantages for effectively communicating with customers but has also been criticized at places for incompetence or security issues. The following examples provide information on its applications and drawbacks: • Interacting with robots while shopping is changing the face of AI in commercial settings. Nestlé Japan, a leading coffee manufacturer, has employed Pepper to sell Nescafé machines to enhance customer experience. Pepper can explain the range of products Nestlé has to offer and recognize human responses using facial recognition and sounds. Using a series of questions and responses to them, the robot identifies a consumer’s need and can recommend the appropriate product. • Some hotels such as Courtyard by Marriott and Mandarin Oriental are employing Pepper to increase customer satisfaction and efficiency. The hotels use Pepper to increase customer engagement, guide guests toward activities that are taking place, and promote their reward programs. Another goal is to collect customer data and fine-tune the communication according to customer preferences. Pepper was deployed steps away from the entry at Disneyland theme park hotels, and it immediately increased customer interactions. Hotels use Pepper to converse with guests while they are checking in or out or to guide them to the spa, gym, and other amenities. It can also inform guests about campaigns and promotions and help staff members avoid the mundane task of enrolling guests in a loyalty program. Customer reactions are largely quite positive in regard to this. • Central Electric Cooperative (CEC), an electric distribution cooperative located in Stillwater, Oklahoma, has installed Pepper to monitor outages. CEC serves more than 20,000 customers in seven counties in Oklahoma. Pepper is connected to the operations center to read information about live outages, and by connecting them to geographic information system (GIS) maps it can also inform operations about the live locations of service trucks. At CEC, Pepper is also used for conferences where attendees can know more about the company and its services. Pepper answers a range of questions regarding energy consumption. In the future, the company plans to invest more in robots to meet its requirements. See Figure 10.2 that shows Pepper participating as a team member during a prospective employee interview to provide input about CEC’s programs and so on. • Fabio, a Pepper robot, was installed as a retail assistant at an upmarket food and wine store in England and Scotland. A week after implementing it, the store pulled the service because it was confusing customers, and they preferred the service from personal staff rather than Fabio. It provided generic answers on queries such as the shelf location of items. However, it failed to understand completely what the customer was requesting due to background noise. Fabio was provided another chance by placing it in a specific area that attracted only a few customers. Then they also complained about Fabio’s inability to move around the supermarket and direct them to a specific section. Surprisingly, the staff at the market became accustomed to Fabio rather than considering it as a competitor. • Pepper has several security concerns that were pointed out by Scandinavian researchers. According to them, it is easy to have unauthenticated root-level access to the bot. They also found the robot to be prone to brute force attack. Pepper’s functions can be programmed using various application programming interfaces (APIs) through languages such as Python, Java, and C + +. This feature can cause it to provide access to all its sensors, making it not secure. An attacker can establish a connection and then use Pepper’s mic, camera, and other features to spy on people and their conversations. This is an ongoing issue for many robots and smart speakers.