There are industry gatherings for all sectors, and that includes the funeral sector. It’s not an area where you’d expect to find many tech products, but at the Tokyo International Funeral & Cemetery Show 2017 this week, all eyes were on the latest breakthrough in Buddhist priests.
各行各业都是工业技术集聚区，包括殡葬业。当然这个行业你可能想象不到有什么高科技，但在本周东京国际殡葬展上，所有的目光都集中在佛教殡葬师的最新突破上。
Hiring a human Buddhist priest for a funeral in Japan costs around $2,200. That’s very expensive, so plastic molding company Nissei Eco Co. had an idea: create a robotic Buddhist priest and undercut the real thing on price. And rather than starting from scratch, Nissei instead modified an existing robot in the form of SoftBank’s Pepper robot.
在日本聘请一位佛教殡葬师的费用约为2,200美元，这是非常昂贵的。所以日精环保有限公司想出了一个好办法—机器人殡葬师，并在价格上优势上取代真人殡葬师。不过这款机器人并不是重新开发，而是在现有的机器人“胡椒”身上进行了相应的修改。
As Hannah Gould, a researcher at the Japan Foundation, points out in the video above, Japan and technology have been evolving at the same time so a robot priest won’t seem too weird. All Nissei had to do to modify the Pepper robot was write some software allowing it to tap the drums while it chanted.
正如日本基金会的研究员汉娜.古尔德在上面的视频中所述，日本和科技同时在发展，因此机器人殡葬师似乎不会显得太过另类。日精环保有限公司需要做的只是为“胡椒”添加一些程序使它能够一边敲鼓一边诵经。
The cost of this Buddhist Pepper robot is going to be around $450 per funeral, so just a quarter of the real priest price. I also suspect it will make less mistakes. But according to Reuters, the robot has yet to be hired for a real funeral. Unlike human priests, Pepper isn’t going to be at all upset about it, though.
“胡椒”机器人殡葬师的出场价格是每次葬礼450美元，所以只有真人殡葬师价格的四分之一。我也考虑过实际上它犯的错误其实应该更少，最起码相比真人殡葬师，“胡椒”不会感到紧张和不安。但据路透社报道，目前还没有人请“胡椒”主持过葬礼。
