- StoryCorps and sauce maker Prego collaborated on a family recording unit
- No AI or monitors just capture dinner conversations
- Only available for a limited time
Prego, a company famous for making tomato sauce 🤌, and StoryCorps, a non-profit organization that’s basically the world’s best listener, have teamed up to help families remember what dinnertime was like before smartphones.
Called The Connection Keeper, it’s a puck-shaped audio recording device that’s about the size of a Prego sauce jar and should fit neatly in the center of any dinner table.
There’s no screen or operating system, just a pair of spatial audio microphones capable of recording CD-quality audio, backed by an ARM Cortex-M7 CPU. It records to a built-in 16GB microSD card for up to 8 hours if your dinners last that long.
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It only records when you press a button and starts almost instantly, but the idea isn’t just to capture, say, an unfortunate dinner table argument. Instead. StoryCorps provides a set of prompt cards with The Connection Keeper to help start your gathering with some helpful, revealing, and impactful discourse. The cards and Connection Keeper come as part of a $20 limited edition bundle that includes (obviously) a jar of Prego Sauce and a box of spaghetti.
StoryCorps is sort of an expert at this. They have been recording the stories of ordinary people for 20 years. I have heard many of them on NPR, but they are also collected in the US Library of Congress.
In fact, those using the device can choose to upload and save their dinner chats to a special section of StoryCorps so they can retrieve and listen to them at any time, and even allow StoryCorps to upload them to the Library of Congress for all to hear.
While some studies have found families sitting in silence (or staring at their devices), a recent study found that the 2020 COVID pandemic forced people back to the dinner table and the discussions it sparks.
Obviously, not every dinner is worth saving, but imagine a last meal with great-great-grandmother, who talks about her time in an American Japanese-American internment camp during World War II. Or maybe grandfather’s harrowing tales of the war in Vietnam.
The device includes a USB port that you can use to start a high-speed transfer to your PC. To keep things simple, the puck automatically switches from recording device to high-speed transfer hard drive as soon as you plug in the USB cable.
In case you’re wondering, there is no AI. The system does not understand or transcribe the conversation. It’s more like dropping a tape recorder in the middle of your dinner table.
Just remember to say “prego” or, um, “please” before you admit any of your dinner guests.
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