Curio’s Gabbo is the modern-day Teddy Ruxpin—if Teddy used Wi-Fi to connect to a neural network. The red, white, and blue stuffed robot has a little box of electronics zipped into its back. Everything it hears gets shipped off to Curio’s cloud, where it’s processed by a fine-tuned language model (based on ChatGPT or Claude, depending on the mode), and then spoken back in a chipper, high-pitched voice that sounds like a cross between a Cocomelon character and a customer service bot.

Joanna Stern, I Am Not a Robot- My Year U…, loc. 1252