During a demonstration of its abilities, Pepper spoke in Mandarin Chinese and responded clearly to questions in the same language, and also showed off its English language capabilities.

Initially, SoftBank and its Taiwanese agent are only marketing Pepper to corporate clients, with the financial services sector a main target. No schedule has been set for Pepper's availability to retail customers in Taiwan.

"Turnover is high in Taiwan's services sector, and we are hoping that Pepper can become an immediate help to local companies," Vincent Lin, general manager of Pepper's Taiwanese agent Perobot, told reporters during the launch event on Monday.

Perobot is offering Pepper for hire at the monthly rate of 26,888 New Taiwan dollars ($836) with a minimum contract of two years. In Japan, Pepper is selling at a retail price of 198,000 yen ($1,863) but customers also have to pay extra services and insurance fees of 24,600 yen per month for a minimum period of three years.

Perobot said its target is to lease out 60 units per month by the first half of 2017.

Perobot is a wholly-owned subsidiary of key iPhone assembler Hon Hai Precision Industry, commonly known as Foxconn Technology Group.

SoftBank enjoys strong ties to Taiwan as manufacturing giant Foxconn makes Pepper for the Japanese company.

Looking to the next stage of expansion, SoftBank has set up a joint venture with Foxconn and Chinese e-commerce titan Alibaba Group Holding to market Pepper worldwide.

While SoftBank has recently announced a deal to acquire British chip designer ARM, Pepper runs on an Intel core processor.

Data from market intelligence firm Genscape also suggested US production had increased.
Inventory at the Cushing, Oklahoma delivery base rose by 1.1 million barrels in the week to 22 July.
"Supply continues to return from disruptions, refined products are severely oversupplied, crude demand is falling well short of product demand, and key product demand is decelerating," Morgan Stanley said in a note.
On Friday, data showed the amount of US oil and gas extraction points had increased for the fourth week in a row.
The slump in prices from as high as $115 per barrel in 2014 led many shale oil producers to cut the number of rigs as producing oil was no longer profitable.
But despite a decrease in American crude supplies over the past year, there are still large stocks of gasoline in the country, even as the US hits its summer driving peak.
The value of the dollar which has steadily risen over the past month has also put pressure on crude oil prices.

In the mining and quarrying sectors, the extraction of products such as iron ore, coal, molybdenum with concentrate, crude oil, copper with concentrate and gold increased by 3.6 percent to 78.4 percent and in the manufacturing sector the output of products such as bakery, wooden doors and windows, cathode copper (99%), soft drinks, spirit, alcoholic beverages, sausages, railway sleepers, electric wires, printing plastic cards increased by 1.2 percent - 2.2 times against the same period of the previous year.

However, extraction of products such as zinc concentrate, fluorspar concentrate, broken or crashed stone decreased by 6.2-50.3 percent.

In the manufacturing sector, production of major consumer products such as beer, buuz and dumpling, metal sleepers, lime, cement, articles of iron concrete, sawn wood, windows and doors, metal steel, metal foundries and steel casting decreased by 0.6-96.1 percent.

Construction and capital repair works’ volume in the first half of 2016 declined by MNT 276.0 million or 0.04 percent compared with the same period of last year. The decrease was mainly due to the slack of MNT 19.9 billion or 61.0 percent in the works done by foreign construction entities.

AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong said the deal was about "unleashing Yahoo's full potential", and creating a major player in mobile media.
Together they will have more than 25 brands, including Yahoo Mail, Flickr and Tumblr as well as AOL's Huffington Post and Techcrunch news sites.
Ms Mayer, who took the helm in 2012, has made little progress in returning the company to profit.
Last week the firm reported a $440m loss in the second quarter, but said the board had made "great progress on strategic alternatives".
Verizon and Yahoo were reported on Friday to be in exclusive talks over a deal.