Most Halloween decorations repeat the same spooky line until the batteries run out. Uncle Murray is a different kind of skeleton. From his spot on one family’s porch in Alameda, California, he holds real conversations with anyone who walks up. He asks about their costume, cracks jokes and shares stories, and no two chats are ever the same.
The mind behind him belongs to 9-year-old Nathalie, who has spent weeks since early September bringing him to life with her dad, Jim Chabas. Together, they took a store-bought animatronic that could only recite a few pre-recorded lines and gave him a new computer brain, a voice and a whole personality: a scientist from beyond the grave who wears pink dolphin slippers.
For Nathalie, the project became a crash course in electronics, building and problem-solving. She also learned to use AI to build something rather than just chat with it, and she calls it her “co-pilot.” Scroll down to see how Uncle Murray came together, one wire at a time.
