Always wanted to get another 90s era furby and build one of those open source virtual assistants into it. Train a voice model on furby, grimlins, ewok, Stitch, and maybe a few animal companions from Disney movies or something so that it speaks a coherent gibberish language with some crudely formed English like a cute creature grammelot. Then put it in charge of home assistant or something.

Bake in a couple of pre-scripted interactions like having it use hostile tones if it doesn't recognize the voice, or get confused if you ask it for something it can't do. Have it go full demonic with the voice turning gutteral and the language taking a Latin tilt if you activate the home security mode just to learn into the old urban legends of them acting creepy when left alone.

Honestly, I'm pretty peeved that we finally have the tech available to do what all those toys promised us as kids an no one seems to be interested in actually making something special. An LLM, a roomba, and a cyberdog slapped together could easily mirror a real dog in all the ways that someone who wants a robotic pet would care. Furbies were 3 buttons and a tilt sensor and they left enough of an impact that we're still taking about them. Imagine if they didn't have less complex input than my humidifier? Instead we just get spyware toasters, data harvesting washing machines, and child porn generators... That's such a waste.