Both NAO and Pepper can be programmed to respond to a variety of stimuli, or programmed to engage in back and forth conversations. This is not a default behavior however, and your NAO or Pepper will not respond to any conversation until you teach it how to.

One easy way to do this is to install something called “Basic Channels” from the Aldebaran Cloud store. Basic Channels is a packaged set of dialog programs that makes the robot conversational right away.

If your NAO or Pepper used to respond to you and recently stopped, it is possible that the volume of the robot has been turned down so low that its answers are inaudible. It is also possible that a microphone is malfunctioning in the head. If you believe this to be the case, Contact Support.

If you push Pepper's chest button and nothing happens, don't panic. In almost every case an unresponsive Pepper is caused by one of two things: a depleted battery or the emergency stop button. Both can be checked easily.

Error 713: I can’t move anymore. I detected an error on n of my vital devices: [list n devices].

NAO does not finish booting up.

In rare cases, after a NAOqi update or factory reset, NAO will get “stuck” during its boot process and will never finish booting up. If you have been waiting (and waiting, and waiting) for NAO to finish booting up, there is probably a solution. This problem can usually be identified by the ear LEDs or the chest button LED.

There are two common reasons a NAO will not stand up. One of them can be fixed by the customer with a computer and the other requires shipping the NAO for service.

Rather than try to distinguish between the two cases, it is easier to simply attempt the intervention and test the result. Your NAO will need to be connected to a WIFI network or hardwired to your computer, and you will need to SSH into the NAO. We use the program PuTTY for this purpose, but you can also use a Command Prompt.