Robot becomes Buddhist priest

There are industry gatherings for all sectors, and that includes the funeral sector. It's not an area where you'd expect to find many tech products, but at the Tokyo International Funeral & Cemetery Show 2017 this week, all eyes were on the latest breakthrough in Buddhist priests. That's very expensive, so plastic molding company Nissei Eco Co. had an idea: create a robotic Buddhist priest and undercut the real thing on price. And rather than starting from scratch, Nissei instead modified an existing robot in the form of SoftBank's Pepper robot. As Hannah Gould, a researcher at the Japan Foundation, points out in the video above, Japan and technology have been evolving at the same time so a robot priest won't seem too weird. All Nissei had to do to modify the Pepper robot was write some software allowing it to tap the drums while it chanted.