Does Prego have a device to record dinner conversations, Capisce?

Prego, the pasta sauce company, is getting into the hardware space with a device that sits on your table and records dinner conversations. No, this is not an April Fool’s joke.

The Connection Keeper is a circular disc that houses two recording microphones around the table. The recorder was developed in partnership with StoryCorpsa 20-year-old nonprofit that has recorded conversations with more than 720,000 people about their lives.

Connection Keeper is more of an advertising stunt than a readily available product. Fewer than 100 will be made. The pucks look more like a can of tuna than you might associate with a pasta sauce brand: they’re small and meant to be set aside so as not to attract attention. Prego and StoryCorps say the whole point here is to advocate for keeping people off their phones during dinner.

“Everything now is AI-driven, and everyone has their phone on the table,” says Elise Henkin, managing director of StoryCorps studios and brand partnerships. “It interrupts the conversation and the flow. We wanted to get rid of that and go back to basics and have everyone talking to each other.”

The pucks come packaged with StoryCorps-inspired cards, designed to stimulate conversations between family members. Some of them target children. Some target parents or other family members.

The device does not register automatically. Press a button, and the device will start 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 the StoryCorps microsite or to the family’s storage unit. There’s no cloud connectivity, no Wi-Fi, and no AI features at all.

The most general element of the project is that StoryCorps will allow users to share their recordings on its website (or keep them private). Anything voluntarily shared will also be physically preserved as a recording alongside the larger StoryCorps collection within the US Library of Congress.

Prego is an American company, named after the Italian word for “you’re welcome.” I’ll tell you this from my experience growing up in an extended Italian-American family: The Connection Keeper will spend a lot of time following the conversation at a table full of your loud uncles and your wine-drunk grandmother, all talking at the same time.

“I think that’s the number of families,” Henkin says. “What StoryCorps does is it reminds us of the similarities we have and the humanity in all of us, even though we are all different. I imagine if someone walked by the group and listened to it, there would be wild moments, there would be kids laughing and their mothers saying, ‘Don’t eat with your mouth full.’ And that’s all part of the truth of it.”