Yes, that Prego — the pasta sauce people. The company has teamed up with StoryCorps, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving everyday American conversations, to release a physical recording device built specifically for the dinner table. It’s called the Connection Keeper, and the whole point of it is to capture the kind of conversations that happen when everyone puts their phones down and actually talks to each other.
What it is and how it works?
The Connection Keeper is a small puck-shaped device, apparently nodding to the round lids on Prego’s pasta sauce jars, that you place in the center of the table. Hit the button on top, and it starts recording. That’s more or less the entire interface. There’s no screen, no app, and no Wi-Fi setup needed for this. Just a button, a USB-C port, and a 16GB microSD card that can store up to eight hours of conversation.
It can also prompt your family with conversation starters if dinner has gone quiet and someone’s just pushing food around their plate.
Where do the recordings go?
Once you’re ready to do something with your recordings, you move them over to a StoryCorps portal via USB-C. StoryCorps keeps everything private by default, and Prego says the portal is encrypted with full privacy controls, though the specifics of how all that works haven’t been fully laid out yet. Recordings will be accessible and shareable starting May 4.
If you want to, you can also contribute your conversations to StoryCorps’ public archive, where anyone online can listen. That’s a meaningful thing to consider before uploading, especially if kids are involved, or anyone at the table didn’t know they were being recorded.
At $20, the price is quite reasonable for what it is. The catch is that Prego plans to produce fewer than 100 units, with sales opening on April 27. So if this sounds like something you’d actually use, you’ll want to move quickly once it goes on sale. It’s a weird product from an unexpected brand, but in a world where every device is fighting for your attention, something that quietly sits on the table and just listens feels almost radical.
A sweet idea, with a slightly complicated aftertaste
The Connection Keeper is a genuinely sweet idea on the surface. There’s something almost nostalgic about a screenless, button-press recorder sitting in the middle of the dinner table, quietly catching the jokes, the arguments, the stories your grandmother tells for the third time that you’ll one day wish you’d heard a fourth. But the moment you start thinking about what actually happens to those recordings, the warm feeling gets a little complicated.
Your dinner-table conversations are as personal as it gets. The things said over a bowl of pasta on a Tuesday night, the offhand comments, the vulnerable moments, the stuff nobody outside that room was ever supposed to hear. Handing any of that over to a portal, even one that claims to be encrypted and private, asks for a level of trust that Prego and StoryCorps haven’t fully earned yet, mostly because they haven’t fully explained themselves. What does “full privacy controls” actually mean in practice? Who has access to the servers? What happens to your recordings if StoryCorps shuts down or gets acquired? These aren’t paranoid questions. They’re reasonable ones that any company asking you to record your family should have ready answers for before the product goes on sale, not after. Until those details are out in the open, the Connection Keeper is a device with a lot of heart and not quite enough transparency to match it.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
