---
layout: post
title:  "We're building an open-source plush duck"
date:   2024-02-15 13:47:19 -0800
---
Uberduck is building an open-source plush duck toy with an AI personality and a voice that you can talk to with your voice. We're going to build and manufacture the toy, open sourcing all the code and hardware information and documenting the manufacturing process. Then we're going to sell the toy on the internet.

<img src="{{ site.baseurl }}/images/plush.png" width="300px"/>

The open-sourcing part will happen in [this repo](openduck-gh), which we're
calling Openduck. The documenting part will happen on this blog and on our
social media pages. The selling bit will happen on our website, either on [our
homepage](uberduck-home) or at a subdomain that doesn't exist yet.

We want you to buy our toy, but we also want you to mod it, hack it, tweak it, replace the voice and personality, and generally crank on anything your heart desires.

I've been obsessed with talking to robots for the past 4 years. The progress in
open-source AI during this period has been stunning, but the era of open,
hackable, real-world AI hardware is [just](mobile-aloha)
[beginning](umi-gripper). If we build the right stuff, in 15 years our kids could
be tinkering on home-built C-3POs like your grandfather may have worked on an
old Cadillac.

Time to build the right stuff.

[uberduck-home]:   https://www.uberduck.ai
[openduck-gh]:   https://github.com/uberduck-ai/openduck
[mobile-aloha]:  https://mobile-aloha.github.io/ 
[umi-gripper]:   https://umi-gripper.github.io/
