It can’t cook or clean or do laundry, but SoftBank’s Pepper could become the first breakout humanoid consumer robot and the vanguard of an era of mechanized, cloud-connected assistants.

Pepper goes on sale in Japan on Saturday at ¥198,000 (US$1,600) plus ¥24,600 in monthly data and insurance fees. That may sound like a lot for a machine that’s basically a webcam on wheels with a penchant for chatting, but it comes with a raft of sensors and cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) chops, and the ability to evolve its skills.

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