This adorable interactive fuzzball wants to be your emotional ally

Life in the modern era can be lonely. For many of us, the pandemic really crystalized just how important it is to maintain meaningful connections, but sometimes that’s easier said than done. If you’ve been struggling to find a fellow human shoulder to lean on, what about the next best thing — an AI-powered emotional partner? This year at CES, Tuya and Robopoet are showing off an adorable little fluffball that’s designed to offer just that.

Meet Fuzozo, an “emotional ally” built to listen to you, sooth you, and maybe even develop an emotional bond over time. Able to communicate not just with spoken language, but also its own “Mao Mao” tongue, the comparisons to Furbies and their Furbish utterances are inevitable. But Fuzozo is a whole lot more than a simple toy meant to entertain.

Fuzozo interacts with users through its speaker and microphone, as well as offering tactile feedback, responding to touch with purr-like vibration. Those two eyes are mini displays, and their changing appearance goes a long way towards communicating Fuzozo’s “moods.”

The software side is where Tuya comes in, providing the backbone needed to connect Robopoet’s hardware with AI models hosted in the cloud. Fuzozo was first introduced last summer, but with WiFi-only connectivity, limiting its usefulness — having a fuzzy little AI buddy feels a lot less exciting when it loses all its AI-based emotional interactions every time you travel away from home. That’s now being addressed, and at CES this year, Fuzozo is getting a cellular-connected upgrade.

Thanks to that, Fuzozo is able to use those AI models to develop a unique personality over time, and you can guide it along the way. In addition to interacting directly with the fuzzy little dude, you can use its connected app to track that progress, as well as share more about yourself through a journaling mode. The idea is to fuel a natural-feeling, growing bond between you and your AI pet.

Fuzozo is available in five different colors, each tied to an elemental “primordial personality key” — but you’re free to steer its personality development from there. And if you happen to bump into a fellow Fuzozo user, you can even tap two of them together to connect over NFC, opening up new possibilities for interaction.

This is clearly not going to be for everyone, but for introverts who are looking for a little more connection, Fuzozo might just be the trick to getting them out of their shell. It’s light enough to be clipped onto a bag, and if anything ever does happen to your new digital friend, you can migrate the personality you’ve developed for it over to a new Fuzozo. That means that if you feel like putting in the work, there’s the potential here to forge a long-term emotional bond. Isn’t living in the future wonderfully weird?