Prego Pasta Jar Lid Records Your Family Convos at Dinner
It's always listening. (The Campbell's Company)
Prego is trying to turn dinnertime into more than just a meal. The pasta sauce brand, owned by the Campbell’s Company, has introduced a small recording device designed to capture family conversations while people gather around the table.
The gadget, called the Connection Keeper, is about the size of a hockey puck and was developed in partnership with the nonprofit oral history group StoryCorps. It’s built to sit in the center of the table and record what’s said during dinner. The device uses two microphones and can store up to eight hours of audio on a 16GB microSD card. It doesn’t rely on WiFi, Bluetooth, or any artificial intelligence features.
Using it is straightforward: press a single button to start recording, then later connect it to a computer to transfer the audio files. From there, recordings can be uploaded to a StoryCorps site, where users decide whether to keep them private, share them, or submit them for preservation in the Library of Congress. The audio can also be accessed through the StoryCorps app, though the idea is to keep phones and screens out of the dining experience itself.
The company plans to release fewer than 100 of the devices. Beginning Monday, they’ll be sold online for $20 as part of a bundle that includes the recorder, a jar of Prego sauce, spaghetti, a set of conversation prompt cards, and a USB-C charging cable.
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