Laughing robot will get a bigger bag of tricks

The Japanese developers of a robot are asking the public to make suggestions on what their waist-high humanoid should be able to do, and they are offering a software development kit for programmers to get creative.

The fast-selling robot, known as Pepper, can already laugh and serve coffee and is being used as a waiter, salesman and customer service representative in about 500 companies in Japan, including Nestle, Mizuho Bank and Nissan.

Now its creators, SoftBank Corp, have started offering a kit, Pepper SDK for Android Studio, that will allow programmers to develop new tasks.