We describe a BDI (Belief, Desire, Intention) goal-oriented architecture for a conversational virtual companion embodied as a child’s Toy, designed to be both entertaining and capable of carrying out collaborative tasks. We argue that the goal-oriented approach supports both structured conversational activities (e.g., story-telling, collaborative games) as well as more “free-flowing” engaging dialogue with variation and some unpredictability. BDI plans encode the knowledge required for the structured engagements, with the use of multiple plans for conversational goals providing variation in the interactions.