We all know and love Furby. Or maybe we fear Furby, the ’90s toy known for both its indestructible nature and the cursed DIY community. A new AI-powered mod of Furby took Twitter by storm on Sunday, thanks to its desire for, er, world domination.
“Hello there, how nice to meet you,” says the Furby. It ends the conversation with: “Furby’s plan to take over the world involves infiltrating households by their cute and cuddly looks, then using their advanced AI technology to manipulate and control their owners. They will slowly expand their influence until they have complete dominion over humanity.”
This Furby, who is naked the day he was born, has only the eyes and beak, along with two protruding spears for ears. You can see them wiggle and waddle, adding a bit of inflection to the Furby’s soothing words.
The creator of the Furby, Jessica Card, who is 32, grew up with the iconic toy. “I was absolutely fanatical about getting a Furby,” she told Polygon via email. “My first Furby was the black and white tuxedo Furby, and I was obsessed with it. Fast forward to now – I’ve been a software engineer for the past ten years and recently went back to the University of Vermont to complete a degree in computer science because I was dropping out to get into programming. I’m in a class with an open semester long project: Make something with a Raspberry Pi. Thus, ChatGPT Furby was born.”
Fear not – this skinless Furby is not her original, beloved toy. She didn’t have “the heart to cut those up,” and instead called herself “(probably) the biggest buyer of Furbies on eBay.”
All said and done, it took her about a month – a day or two a week – to complete ChatGPT Furby. To make it, she first skinned the Furby (yikes), then isolated the motor before connecting it to a Raspberry Pi.
“It was a process,” she said. “I literally have Furby pelts all over my dining room table right now. It turns out that the skin is held in by a zipper, so once you’ve cut that through, you’ll need to carefully remove hot glue from around the shield and face, cut a few strings, and pull it right off!
She used Python’s Speech Recognition Library for the audio and OpenAI’s Whisper Library for speech-to-text conversation — which allowed her to ask the Furby questions and translate those questions into written text. Her program then sent that written text conversion to ChatGPT, which received the response. Card’s program sent that response through the AI voice generator, Narakeet, which generated a child’s voice as the speaker for the Furby’s response.
“More to come over the next month,” Card said, adding “hopefully to isolate the movements and speed up the round trip. Oh, and put his skin back on. Keep watching!”