Tomy Co. on Thursday introduced a conversation robot jointly developed with NTT Docomo Inc. that it claims can hold "natural" conversations with people.
"We want to develop toys that are not only for play, but also for jumping into people's everyday lives to make them more convenient," said Tomy COO H.G. Meij at a Tokyo news conference Thursday.
The robot, Ohanas, is scheduled for release on Oct. 1 (in Japanese only) and converses with help from a cloud-based conversation database that Docomo calls the "natural-language dialogue platform," the two firms said.