NEC, a Japanese company, is determined to develop and build personal robots that can live in the home and serve as companions to family members. When it came out with PaPeRo, a childcare robot, several years back they were pretty pleased with themselves since they saw it as a really viable personal robot. The original PaPeRo “is capable of recognizing and verbally communicating with people, sending images by mobile phone to persons far away, as well as playing games and singing along with others.”

The new PaPeRo is supposed to be a lot better than the old PaPeRo (both the 2001 and 2005 versions) not just because it is smaller, and thus more portable but is also reportedly smarter. It retains the old features of the original PaPeRo including facial recognition and speech synthesis but stands out because it is smarter. Now, since NEC still hasn’t released the full specs of PaPeRo Mini and I still haven’t seen any videos of it I can’t tell why and how it is smarter. I guess it might be more witty? In any case the wit would be lost in me if it speaks in Japanese. As for the appearance the PaPeRo Mini looks more slick and fluid. The prototype is a plain white and gray little robot although it is unclear whether they will be coming up with more colorful versions like in the original PaPeRo.

The PaPeRo Mini measures 179 x 170 x 250 mm and weighs 5.5 pounds as opposed to the original PaPeRo, which measures 385 x 262 x 250 mm and weighs 13.2 pounds (6kg).