Prego wants to spice up dinner conversation with more than tomato and basil. The pasta sauce brand own by the Campbell’s Company has built a gadget called the Connection Keeper, a hockey puck-size recording device meant to sit in the middle of the table and capture whatever your family talks about over spaghetti, reports the Verge. Made in conjunction with the nonprofit oral-history project StoryCorps, the lidlike device uses two microphones to log up to eight hours of audio on a 16GB microSD card, with no WiFi, Bluetooth, or AI on board.
To use the device, you press a single button, talk, then later plug it into a computer to move the files. From there, users can upload conversations to a StoryCorps microsite, then choose to keep them private, share them with others, or even opt to have them archived at the Library of Congress. The recordings are playable through the StoryCorps app, but Prego deliberately kept phones and screens out of the dining room experience itself. Fewer than 100 units are being made. Starting Monday, they’ll sell online for $20, in a bundle that includes the recorder, a jar of Prego, spaghetti to go with the sauce, and a deck of conversation-starter cards, as well as a USB-C charging cable, per a release.