We all know and love Furby. Or maybe we fear Furby, the 1990s toy known for both its indestructibility and the cursed DIY community. A new AI-powered modification of Furby took Twitter by storm on Sunday thanks to his desire for, um, world domination.
“Hello, nice to meet you,” says the Furby. The conversation ends with, “Furby’s plan to take over the world involves infiltrating households through her cute and cuddly looks and then using her advanced AI technology to manipulate and control her owners. They will slowly expand their influence until they have complete dominion over humanity.”
Naked as the day he was born, this Furby has only the eyes and beak and two protruding spears for ears. You can watch them wiggle and wiggle, adding some inflection to the Furby’s soothing words.
Furby creator Jessica Card, 32, grew up around the iconic toy. “I was absolutely rabid about getting a Furby,” she told Polygon via email. “My first Furby was the Furby black and white tuxedo and I was obsessed with it. Fast forward to now – I’ve been a software developer for the last ten years and recently went back to college at the University of Vermont to get a degree in computer science after dropping out to study programming. I’m in a class that has an open semester project: making something with a Raspberry Pi. This is how ChatGPT Furby was born.”
Fear not – this skinless Furby is not her original beloved toy. She didn’t have “the heart to cut that up” and instead called herself “(probably) the biggest buyer of Furbies on eBay.”
All in all, it took her about a month – she devoted a day or two a week – to complete ChatGPT Furby. To make it, she first skinned the Furby (yikes), then insulated its motor before hooking it up to a Raspberry Pi.
“It was a process,” she says. “I literally have Furby pelts on my dinner table right now. It turns out the skin is held in place by a zip tie, so once you’ve cut that, you need to carefully remove the hot glue from around the carapace and face, snip a few threads, and pull it right off!”
She used Python’s speech recognition library for the audio and OpenAI’s Whisper Library for the speech-to-text conversation – which allowed her to ask the Furby questions and translate those questions into written text. Your program then sent this written text conversion to ChatGPT, which received the response. Card’s program sent this response through the Narakeet AI speech generator, which generated a child’s voice to speak for the Furby’s response.
“There will be more over the next month,” Card said, adding, “Hopefully movements will be isolated and round-trip speeding up.” Oh, and putting his skin back on. Stay tuned!”
