Wednesday, November 14, 2018

These antique Alexaphones won’t spy on your conversations

The Avignon Alexaphone.

I’ve never felt the need to own an Amazon Echo device, partly because I feel like I can Google things faster than a voice assistant can understand me, but mostly because of that one time a bunch of Alexa devices all decided to creepily laugh at their owners, unprompted. But then I saw these antique phones modified with Alexa functionality, which only listen to you when the handset is off the receiver, and it made perfect sense. It’s no longer a hands-free voice assistant by any means, but all these privacy violations have taught us that when the future feels too overwhelming, it’s best to take a few steps back by a few decades.

Christine Sunu and Dick Whitney of Grain Design have created three different models: the Regent, a Belgian...

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