Robots are taking over iPhone manufacturer Foxconn: the world's biggest contract fabricator has successfully replaced as many as 60,000 factory workers with sophisticated machines that use artificial intelligence to perform elaborate assembly work more efficiently than humans do, a government official told the South China Morning Post. One Foxconn plant has "reduced employee strength from 110,000 to 50,000 thanks to the introduction of robots" and "more companies are likely to follow suit," said Xu Yulian, head of publicity for the Kunshan region in the Jiangsu province, which is a manufacturing hub for the electronics industry. About 600 major companies in Kunshan are planning to tap artificial intelligence to replace workers with robots. Foxconn Technology Group confirmed to the BBC that it was automating "many of the manufacturing tasks associated with our operations." Still, Foxconn insists that using robots does not entail long-term job losses.

It's graduation season here in the US, and the job market is busier than ever. For Softbank's emotion-reading Pepper robot, however, landing a gig seems to have been easy as pie. MasterCard today announced that Pepper will soon be implemented in Pizza Hut restaurants in Singapore to take orders and process payments. They do so by "greeting" Pepper and pairing a MasterPass account to Pepper's attached tablet. Then, Pepper will take your order and allow you to customize it however you like without any side-eyeing or risk of getting spit in your food.

Domino's may be forward thinking with its smartphone apps, but Pizza Hut is about to let a damn robot take your order. Pizza Hut Asia and MasterCard are partnering to bring Pepper, SoftBank's somewhat creepy humanoid robot to restaurants by the end of 2016. If all goes to plan, Pepper will be able to take and process entire customer orders. This marks the first commerce application for Pepper, according to MasterCard. It starts with an innocent, friendly hello.

Japanese Softbank announced that the humanoid Pepper robot will support Google's Android operating system. The Android Pepper robots will go on sale starting in July for developers. Ahead of the launch, starting today SoftBank Robotics is offering a beta version of'Pepper SDK for Android Studio', a software development kit that enables the development of RoboApps on the Android platform. By making Pepper compatible with Android, Android application developers will be able to utilize their existing knowledge and technologies to develop RoboApps for Pepper. With the high number of Android developers around the world, the possibilities for Pepper RoboApp developers will greatly increase with Android support.

When Japanese mobile phone company SoftBank offered 1000 of its emotionally intelligent Pepper robots for the consumer market last summer, the entire run sold out in under a minute. At CES this year, SoftBank announced that IBM would be bringing Watson's artificial intelligence to Pepper, a bid to ready the robot for broad adoption in the home.

SoftBank Robotics Corp. ("SoftBank Robotics") and SoftBank Corp. ("SoftBank") today announced that its humanoid robot'Pepper' will support Google's Android, and that presales of models for developers will begin from July 2016. Ahead of the presales launch, starting today SoftBank Robotics will offer a beta version of'Pepper SDK for Android Studio', a software development kit that enables the development of RoboApps on the Android platform. By making Pepper compatible with Android, Android application developers will be able to utilize their existing knowledge and technologies to develop RoboApps for Pepper. With the high number of Android developers around the world, the possibilities for Pepper RoboApp developers will greatly increase with Android support. SoftBank Robotics will continue to provide its SDK, 'Choregraphe'.

Google has revealed a new personal assistant for around the house that can control, run and organise your entire home using just your voice. The device, a voice-activated speaker called Google Home forms the centre of a Google plan to use artificial intelligence in computing to help give every user "their own individual Google" by becoming personal to them, according to the firm's chief. CEO Sundar Pichai used the keynote presentation at the firm's I/O developer conference in California to reveal new apps, software and a voice activated personal assistant that take advantage of new, more intelligent Google software that is better at understanding context. Mr Pichai said of the new Google Home personal assistant connects to WiFi and can control other connected appliances: "Computing is poised to evolve beyond just phones. It will be about the context. The new, more intelligent software also focuses on understanding context to answer queries and has been built into the existing Google ...

Google used its I/O 2016 event to talk up its work in areas including machine learning and virtual reality, with head Sundar Pichai stating that "we are pushing ourselves really hard so that Google is evolving, and staying ahead of our users". A significant amount of time was dedicated to the growing importance of voice-driven services, with the executive stating that 20 per cent of queries from US mobile users are already made in this way. "Given how differently users are engaging with us, we want to push ourselves and deliver rich information in the context of mobile," he said. Driving this is Google Assistant, which it described as "conversational", and more like a context-aware two way dialogue. This, it said, is enabled by its natural language processing technology – "our ability to do conversational understanding is far ahead of what other assistants can do".

SoftBank Robotics Corp. said Thursday it has expanded opportunities for app developers to use Google's Android platform for its humanoid robot Pepper. It hopes to encourage more programmers to develop apps for the device. An Android-ready Pepper model will go on sale in July, though only for developers, and on Thursday an Android development toolkit was made available for download, Fumihide Tomizawa, SoftBank Robotics chief, told a news conference at the firm's headquarters in Tokyo. Previously, there was a development platform specially designed for Pepper, but it was not based on Android. Tomizawa said the number of developers could increase 100-fold, as there are only several thousand Pepper app designers but hundreds of thousands of Android coders.

Pepper is finally coming to America. SoftBank said today that its chatty humanoid robot, unveiled with great fanfare by the company's founder and CEO Masayoshi Son two years ago, is expected to debut in the North American market later this year. SoftBank also announced that a new developer portal is now available to anyone interested in creating applications for the robot. And tomorrow at Google I/O, SoftBank engineers will take the stage, along with Pepper, to introduce a tool that they hope will entice more developers to build apps for the robot: an Android SDK. "We're so excited to see what the development community can bring on to our platform," Steve Carlin, vice president of marketing and business development for SoftBank Robotics America, told IEEE Spectrum, adding that "ultimately what is going to really power Pepper is the creativity of this community."