Chris Chesher, May 2023
Imagine eating morning tea surrounded by social robots. Pepper Parlor is a concept restaurant that offers just that experience. It is a large café on the fifth floor of the Tokyu Plaza Shibuya in Tokyo, a shopping centre that opened in December 2019, just in time to close down for the pandemic.
The Pepper robots played a social role as conversation partner and entertainer at each booth or table. However, in the noisy environment of the café we found it difficult to get our Pepper to converse with us. We had more success choosing the dance option from its touch screen and watching it groove to Gangnam Style (a song which was only 2-years old when Pepper was released, but seems a little anachronistic now).
We visited Pepper Parlour with a group of robotics researchers in April 2023, only 6 months after Japan opened up again to international visitors after the COVID-19 pandemic. We arrived in the café at 11am as the shopping centre opened to be greeted by three Pepper robot concierges. The café features more than two dozen Pepper robots overall, as well as a supporting cast including Servi, Nao, Whiz, Aibo and RoBoHoN robots.
For some background, Pepper was released by Aldebaran in France in 2014, which was bought by Japanese telco Softbank in 2015, and became Aldebaran again in 2022, when it was acquired by United Robotics, Germany in the same year. Although Pepper is among the most high profile social robots, only around 27,000 of these robots had been sold before the production line was paused in 2021.
Among the others, Servi from Bear Robotics is a cylindrical robot with three levels of trays used to deliver food. It shuttles down the aisles at quite a clip. Nao is the much smaller and older brother of Pepper, made by the same engineering team in France. It, too, is capable of dancing and attempting to communicate. Whiz is a commercial vacuum cleaner that we suspect only comes out at night. Aibo is Sony’s robot dog, a device released first in 1999 and discontinued in 2006, much to the disappointment of its fans. The version we saw was the version released to great acclaim in 2018. These Aibos appeared behind plexiglass, perhaps to discourage excessive petting.
But overall, Pepper Parlor is a showcase of lively non-humans. Every so often, music plays and many of these robots perform a collective dance.
As a showcase for technology, and for the advanced futuristic tech of the company Softbank, the design concept made an effort to downplay the presence of human labour in the cafe, but there still were human workers quietly bringing out drinks and clearing the tables. Overall, the parlour’s function is ideological, serving to cast robot technologies as friendly, unthreatening and even delightful, and to contrast with these unglamorous human workers that speak of everyday work and mortality.
Chris Chesher and Justine Humphry – May 2023
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