Go all retro with Alexa-powered antique rotary telephones

Going all retro, a firm is bringing Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa to the antique rotary telephones, with a goal to ‘combine classical design and usability with the most salient elements of your modern world’.

A Los Angeles-based company named Grain Design is bringing back the old telephones but with a new modern touch to it. The firm provides Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant, to old telephones, so that a user won’t worry about their conversations being recorded.

Costing $1,500, the Alexaphones run on USB power and sets up using the Alexa app running on a Bluetooth-paired smartphone. Currently, the company sold three antique models: the Regent, a Belgian model from late 1950s, the Metropolis candlestick rotary phone, and the solid brass 1920s Avignon.

Initially reported by BoingBoing, the company owner Dick Whitney uses the method to modify the hardware in order to make room for an Echo Dot inside. With a user picks up the phone and speaks, Alexa answers from the other side, similar to the normal operator.

The creators claim that in some of the phones, called Alexaphones, they have managed to preserve the earpiece electronics is some models, which means that the user can hear Alexa in the original voice of the phone. Also, the microphone physically disconnects when the phone is on the hook, keeping users’ privacy intact, reported Tech Crunch.

“The Echo microphones have their connections severed or are removed completely, and the microphone in the handset is connected via the original switches in the base, so it’s only in contact when the handset is picked up,” explained Whitney.

Each phone runs in the same method as an Amazon Echo. With Alexa acting as the switchboard operator, user can use it for connecting them to friends, controlling smart home devices or tapping into the internet’s knowledge base, as per New Atlas.

Moreover, in the phone’s rear will be a 3.5mm aux port so the user can plug in a real speaker. There is also an LED so that the user has the basic feedback of whether the device is on, listening and such. The rotary dial, however, isn’t used in the whole process.