Turning a Furby into an Amazon Echo | Hacker News Reader

Turning a Furby into an Amazon Echo

howchoo.com

200 pointsahemphill26 comments

"Furby is comprised of a few primary components -- a microprocessor covered in black resin (to protect Tiger Electronics' intellectual property)"

Wishful thinking. It's chip-on-board technology, which lowers the cost of the final product. In the toy business, every penny counts.

Anyone can decap a chip package these days, the COB resin is not any more secure.

https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/how-chip-on-boards-are-...

http://www.ue.com.hk/index.php/Saving_Cost_-_Bare_Die_Assemb...

During the video he says, "Furlexa, tell me about furbies". My echo dot heard this and proceeded to tell me about Herpes.

That's because the results are personalized.. ;p

Disappointed that it doesn't lip-sync (like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRxhgxH6FUI)

I think this is primarily the fault of the mechanism that handles the... beak(?) movement. I believe opening and closing is a continuous loop on reduced gear motor. Getting that to synchronize is difficult, especially as the echo just hands you back an mp3.

It would be really cool if it modulated the Alexa voice to sound like a Furby too!

And if the mouth would be more aligned with the talking, but the engine is probably not strong enough.

But it seems that the echo-light is somehow coupled to the eyes, which is nice.

This would be awesome to do with one of Hasbro's "Furbacca".

It's crazy to me that these things have only one motor that controls their eyelids, ears, mouth and their base.

Is there a product like this just for kids: a furry, friendly, interactive, mobile, voice-based connection to the internet? It could be an early learning tool (and source of great annoyance and surprise hilarity). Kids could learn to make apps for their wrapped Alexa, apps that help them help themselves and their friends, parents, etc...

[I am now imagining the Star Trek episode "The Trouble with Tribbles" where all tribbles are Alexa wrappers... X_x save me!]

It would be a security nightmare and you’d be targeting kids.

Hm, yeah, maybe a DIY or Kit is better than full-fledged product. But is it just as bad as giving your child an iPad with Siri?

In the case of the iPad they get to say they’re not targeting kids specifically and the rest is on the parent, but oh god yes I agree with the point you’re making.

Cute. Playing the video constantly had my own Amazon Echo answering the same questions.

It's not clear how much the Alexa Voice Service would cost in a commercial product?

Actually I can't see anything about licensing costs, just a program that approves the device you are building.

So I assume is it free if you build a product for it. Maybe they want to achieve world domination?

The device SDK appears to be Apache2-licensed: https://github.com/alexa/avs-device-sdk/blob/master/LICENSE....

... so I guess at no cost?

I can understand the SDK being free, it would seem strange to me that a commercial product could actually plug in to the service for free, and without limits.

Ultimately, the service enables people to order from Amazon and gathers training data for their algorithms, so regardless of whether you're using it through an Echo or a Furby or whatever else, they win.

To put it bluntly, why would they stop others from making their profitable data collection easier and doing it for them?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Echo#Privacy_concerns

I'd not be that surprised, if when you build with it it has the same kind of features as an echo. Wanting to play music means you are more likely to get amazon music prime, or pay for song storage. Ordering directly and making shopping lists pushes you towards amazon.

It may be cheaper for them than the affiliate scheme.

Amazon want to have their voice-recording and person tracking capabilities in as many places as possible, tracking as many people as possible.

If you want to build hardware for them, convince users to install it, and send all the juicy data back to Amazon, why would they try to stop you?

Want one. Now. My daughter would freak on christmas.

I wonder if the finished product is smart enough to distinguish between Alexa "speaking" and playing audio. It would be really annoying to constantly hear those gears moving while listening to music.

On the other hand, I'd love to code the pi to randomly make the eyes blink and move on occasion.

I'm interested in how the author got the sound working. I would have thought that external usb dacs would work just fine, as they seem to be plug and play compatible with just about everything, but apparently that isn't the case. Could somebody elaborate?

Science has gone too far

Sounds like a great way to train children to interact with and trust corporate mass surveillance because it's "cute" and "fun".

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