Want pasta sauce to register your family

As if there weren’t enough devices listening to everything said in your home, Prego, the pasta and pizza sauce brand, is launching a device designed to record everything said around the dinner table for generations to come. The Connection Keeper, which looks like the lid of an oversized pasta pot, was created in collaboration with… StoryCorpsa non-profit organization focused on preserving Americans’ stories in a collection housed at the Library of Congress. Center for American Folklife. There’s no AI, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth, but you can optionally upload recordings to the StoryCorps website to make it easier to share with family.

Prego says the goal of the device is to encourage families to make memories through conversation over dinner rather than staring at their phones — but only for a small number of families. The company only plans to produce less than 100 of them. He will be the contact keeper Available to buy online starting April 27 For $20 as part of a package that includes the device, a jar of Prego sauce, spaghetti noodles, and a deck of cards with conversation ideas and prompts.

Using the device is as easy as placing the Connection Keeper in the middle of everyone at the table and pressing a single button to start recording. Using a pair of microphones, it captures CD-quality audio to a 16GB microSD card for up to eight hours when fully charged.

When dinner is over, the recordings can be transferred to a computer via USB-C and then uploaded to a dedicated mini-site created by StoryCorps where they are saved and can only be accessed by the uploader, unless they choose to share them with other StoryCorps users or the general public. You also have the option to archive it within the Library of Congress, automatically making it public, so hopefully your family will talk about more than just that Stealing minds.

Recordings can be accessed on a smartphone through the StoryCorps app, but Prego intentionally left phones out of the rest of the process to discourage their use at the table. This is also why the Connection Keeper lacks a screen. The goal was to reduce interactions with the device so that family members would instead focus on talking to each other.