Japanese telecom giant SoftBank has announced that its “emotionally intelligent” robot will go on sale from June 20.

The launch will be limited to a mere 1,000 units initially, and sales will be restricted to Japan, however news also emerged today that Alibaba and Foxconn will each invest 14.5 billion Japanese yen (a little more than $236 million combined) in SoftBank’s robotics arm — SoftBank Robotics Holdings (SBRH).

This deal will see Alibaba and Foxconn each take a 20 percent stake in SBRH, and the triumvirate will “build a structure to bring Pepper and other robotics businesses to global markets.” No timescale is given for the wider rollout.

First unveiled last June, “Pepper” can analyze gestures, voice tones, and expressions — all powered by a cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) system. However, SoftBank says Pepper also has emotions.

“These emotion functions in Pepper are modeled on the human release of hormones in response to stimuli absorbed by the five senses which in turn generate emotions,” the SoftBank statement reads. “In addition to Pepper’s emotion recognition functions, Pepper has capabilities to generate emotions autonomously by processing information from his cameras, touch sensors, accelerometer and other sensors within his ‘endocrine-type multi-layer neural network’.”