Technology advances rapidly, bringing with it surprising discoveries and combinations. In this context, the Raspberry Pi and ChatGPT-based Furby emerges as a perfect fusion of the past and the future. Furbies, thanks to their unique appearance and interactive capabilities, have been among the most loved toys of the last decades and, precisely because of their popularity, Jessica Card has chosen to take these little animals to the next level. To do this, he connected one of them to a Raspberry Pi 4 and, using a USB microphone and a Python speech recognition module, created a system that could communicate like never before.
The Furby modified receives user questions, which are processed by OpenAI's Whisper speech transcription library and forwarded to ChatGPT, which generates a text response that is converted into speech using the Narakeet text-to-speech library and played through a USB speaker . In this way, the Furby is able to talk to the user in a natural way.
i hooked up chatgpt to a furby and I think this may be the start of something bad for humanity pic.twitter.com /jximZe2qeG
— jessica card (@jessicard) April 2, 2023
--> The true value of Jessica Card's project lies in the possible future applications. A Furby modified in this way could be used as an educational tool to teach children the basics of programming and artificial intelligence, or as a conversational companion for the elderly or anyone who wants social interaction with a technological device. It could also be further expanded to include other features, such as facial recognition, the ability to answer more complex questions, or the ability to interact with other online devices and services.
The project shows how the Raspberry Pi can give new life to old toys, offering new possibilities for interaction and learning. The versatility of the Raspberry Pi, combined with Python and other libraries, opens up a world of opportunities to develop creative and innovative projects.