From the Spring Hill series of short stories:
The Pet Lover Meow, squawk, cheep, growl, thump-thump. Maddie looked at the gathering in the kitchen, and exclaimed, “Everyone wants to be fed at once! I should replace all of you with AIs, like Barino, thenI could turn you off !” Of course, she didn’t mean it. She loved taking care of them, all of them. Over the years, she had hundreds of pets. Many were AIs, starting with “Lulu the FurReal Cat” when she was a kid. Lulu was probably still around, packed away in the garage in a box marked “Memories”. Barino was one of her favorites. He was quiet right now. He had plugged his mouth into the electrical outlet, to get his charge for the day. He heard her say his name. His auditory processors did the recognizing, and passed that information on to the cluster of computer chips in that made up his upper brain. His upper brain fired an alertness command to the processors in his head musculature. The upper brain had not yet analyzed the situation. That would take anot...