Scottish store "fires" Pepper robot

An Edinburgh-based store of British chain Margiotta halted its Pepper robot experiment after merely a week, because its customers apparently found it too confusing.

Too vague

The robot was hired to help customers quickly, but that did not turn out that way. Customers felt its answers were too vague or that it even failed to answer at all. The latter was mainly because the robot could not hear the question because of background noise. It also lacked the room to manoeuvre, which made it impossible to efficiently help customers that were looking for a product.

Fabio, as the robot was called, was given another chore, handing out samples but it failed to do even that. Human employees were more convincing than Fabio.

Margiotta then decided to halt the entire project. “Unfortunately Fabio didn’t perform as well as we had hoped,” Margiotta said. “People seemed to be actually avoiding him”, Margiotta said.