It says good morning when the room wakes up
Not at a time you set. It waits until it hears the day start. If the room has still not moved by mid morning, that is the first thing it does something about.
Volnetra keeps a little company, and keeps an eye on the day, for a person who lives on their own. It works by listening. There is no camera, and nothing it hears leaves the house.
No contract. If you stop paying, the reminders and the conversation keep working. You lose the calling and the alerts.
It speaks about six times a day. It spends the rest of the time not speaking, which is the harder half of the design.
Not at a time you set. It waits until it hears the day start. If the room has still not moved by mid morning, that is the first thing it does something about.
A reminder at 9:30 every day becomes wallpaper within two weeks. A reminder attached to something she already does, like filling the kettle, does not. And if it hears the box rattle, it does not ask again.
Two or three exchanges about the afternoon or what is on later. It is not trying to be a friend, and it does not fill silence. When she stops answering, it stops.
Calling her son is saying his name out loud from the chair. There is no button to find, no phrase to memorise, and no screen anywhere on it.
The impact and the quiet that follows are both audible from across the flat. It checks with her first. A device that calls an ambulance every time a saucepan hits the floor gets unplugged by Thursday.
You are going to have this conversation with her. Here is our side of it, including the parts where she is right.
“I do not need it.”
Today, she is probably right. Most people get something like this after the fall rather than before, which is the wrong way round, but it is how it goes. If she does not want it, do not install it. It does not work in a house where it is resented.
“I do not want to be recorded.”
Nothing is recorded. The listening happens inside the box on the shelf, and the sound is gone the moment it has been understood. No copy exists anywhere else, so there is nothing to leak, nothing to subpoena and nothing to sell. The whole product is built around being able to say that plainly.
“I am not learning another gadget.”
There is nothing to learn. No screen, no app for her, no wake word to remember. You talk to it the way you would say something to a person who happens to be in the room.
“I am not lonely.”
Then use it for the tablets and the calls and ignore the rest. It is not sold as a cure for loneliness. A machine that pretends to be company is worse than no machine.
“Who is on the other end of this?”
You are, and only when something happens. A message if she falls and confirms it, and a short weekly note if she has agreed to one. There is no feed of her day, no dashboard and no log. We did not build one, on purpose.
Most devices in this category send the sound of the room to a server. That is not a scandal, it is just how they are built, because the speech recognition runs over there. But the consequence is real: a copy of the room exists somewhere else, held under a retention policy that can change, at a company that can be sold.
Volnetra does the recognition on the device instead. That is a much harder engineering problem, and it is the reason this is a box with its own microphones rather than an app on a tablet. It is also what lets us say something simple. There is no microphone off switch, because the sound never had anywhere to go.
Three things leave the house, and only these:
Volnetra is an early concept from people who have spent a long time on far field audio, which is the unglamorous corner of the field concerned with hearing one quiet voice across a noisy room. That problem is most of this product.
We are looking for a small number of families, and one or two care providers, to build the first version alongside. Nothing is on sale and the prices above are estimates.
Put your name downIf you are weighing this up for a parent, we would rather hear the awkward version. Which of the things you already bought is sitting in a drawer, and what happened.
hello@volnetra.com