We all know and love Furby. Or maybe we worry Furby, the Nineties toy that has a repute for each its indestructible nature, and cursed DIY group. A brand new AI-powered modification of Furby took Twitter by storm on Sunday, because of its want for, erm, world domination.
“Hello there, it’s so nice to meet you,” the Furby says. It ends the dialog with: “Furby’s plan to take over the world involves infiltrating households through their cute and cuddly appearance, then using their advanced AI technology to manipulate and control their owners. They will slowly expand their influence until they have complete domination over humanity.”
This Furby, which is bare because the day it was born, has solely the eyes and beak, together with two protruding spears for ears. You can watch them wiggle and waggle, including a bit of inflection to the Furby’s soothing phrases.
The Furby’s creator Jessica Card, who’s 32, grew up with the long-lasting toy. “I was absolutely fanatical about getting a Furby,” she informed Polygon through e mail. “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 last decade, and I recently went back to college at the University of Vermont to finish a degree in Computer Science because I dropped out to pursue programming. I am in a class which has an open ended semester long project: create something with a Raspberry Pi. Thus, ChatGPT Furby was born.”
Fear not — this skinless Furby isn’t her unique, beloved toy. She didn’t have “the heart to cut that one up,” and as a substitute referred to as herself “(probably) the biggest purchaser of Furbies on eBay.”
All mentioned and performed, it took her a few month — dedicating a day or two every week — to finish ChatGPT Furby. To make it, she first skinned the Furby (yikes), then remoted its motor earlier than hooking it as much as a Raspberry Pi.
“It was a process,” she mentioned. “I literally have Furby pelts all over my dining room table right now. It turns out the skin is held on by a zip tie, so once you cut that, you then have to carefully remove hot glue around the carapace 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 dialog — which allowed her to ask the Furby questions, and for these inquiries to be translated to written textual content. Her program then despatched that written textual content conversion to ChatGPT, which obtained the response. Card’s program despatched that response by means of the AI voice generator, Narakeet, which generated a baby’s voice because the speaker for the Furby’s reply.
“There will be more to come with it over the next month,” Card mentioned, including “hopefully isolating the movements and speeding up the round trip time. Oh, and putting its skin back on. Stay tuned!”
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