Hitachi's Emiew3 humanoid robot is smaller and faster than Softbank's Pepper, speaks four languages, set for release in 2018
Hitachi readying robotic rival to SoftBank's Pepper — TOKYO — The android moves at a top speed of 6kph. In just a few years, it will provide customer service in airports …
Context & Ripple Effects
When Hitachi unveiled Emiew3, SoftBank's Pepper was at peak momentum: Alibaba and Foxconn had put $236M behind taking Pepper global, and the first 1,000-unit run sold out within a minute. Hitachi's counter is a spec-sheet attack — 6kph top speed versus Pepper's slower gait, four languages, and a stated deployment target of airport customer service from 2018.
First-order effects
- SoftBank now faces a direct corporate rival in service humanoids rather than hobbyist comparisons — Hitachi is aiming at the same airport-and-retail customer-service deployments Pepper was built for.
Second-order effects
- SoftBank's answer within weeks was platform, not hardware: opening Pepper to Android apps to broaden appeal against a competitor promising faster movement and multilingual service out of the box.
Third-order effects
- The pattern that followed cuts against both players' hardware bets — SoftBank eventually stopped producing Pepper and scaled back robotics globally, while the field's energy moved toward cheap open-source machines like Hugging Face's sub-$3,000 humanoids, suggesting proprietary service robots struggled to find a paying market at scale.
The trend: Customer-facing humanoid robotics has repeatedly found that headline specs and sell-out launches do not guarantee a durable business, pushing the category from corporate flagship hardware toward low-cost open platforms.