Prego, the pasta sauce company, is getting into hardware with a device that sits on your table and records dinner conversations. No, it’s not an April Fool’s joke.
The Connection Keeper is a round puck that houses two microphones for recording around the table. The recorder was developed in partnership with body of historythe 20-year-old nonprofit that has recorded conversations with more than 720,000 people about their lives.
The Connection Keeper is more of a publicity stunt than a readily available product. Fewer than 100 will be made. The rounds look more like a can of tuna than what you’d associate with the brand of pasta sauce: small and meant to be tossed aside so as not to attract attention. According to Prego and StoryCorps, the main goal here is to advocate for people not to use their phones during dinner.
“Now everything is AI, and everyone has their phone on the table,” says Elyce Henkin, general manager of StoryCorps Studios and Brand Partnerships. “It interrupts the conversation and the flow. We wanted to get rid of that and get back to basics and have everyone talking to each other.”
The pucks come with StoryCorps-inspired cards, designed to spark conversations between family members. Some are aimed at children; some are aimed at parents or other family members.
The device does not record automatically. Press a button and the device starts recording CD-quality audio. Press the button again to stop. It records all audio to a 16GB microSD card that can hold up to eight hours of audio at a time. These recordings can then be saved to a StoryCorps microsite or to the family’s own storage. There is no cloud connection, no Wi-Fi, and no artificial intelligence functionality.
The most community-driven element of the project is that StoryCorps will allow users to share their recordings on its website (or keep them private). Everything that was voluntarily shared will also be physically preserved as a record with the larger StoryCorps collection at the United States Library of Congress.
Prego is an American company, named after the Italian word for “you’re welcome.” I’ll tell you this from growing up in an extended Italian-American family: The Connection Keeper is going to have a lot of trouble following a conversation at a table full of loud uncles and your wine-drunk grandmother, all talking at the same time.
“I think it reflects the situation of many families,” Henkin says. “What StoryCorps does is it reminds us of our similarities and the humanity that is in all of us, even though we are all different. I imagine if someone went through and listened to the collection, there would be loud moments, and there would be kids laughing and moms saying, ‘Don’t eat with your mouth full.’ It’s all part of the truth.
