How this guy turned a rotary phone into Google Assistant
Thanks to Amazon and Google's smart home devices, digital assistants run our homes today. The gadgets are incredibly useful, and just recently, a creative Reddit user took the game to a whole new level. They turned an old-school rotary phone, a device we used decades ago, into a fully-functional smart assistant. Here's all you need to know about it.
Hacking Google Home Mini into rotary phone
The person, going by Movieman_75, hacked a Google Home Mini smart speaker into the rotary telephone. Basically, they replaced the internal circuitry of the phone with a Google Home Mini smart speaker and configured the whole thing to work in such a way that the receiver was used as both a mic and a speaker for Google Assistant-related functions.
How this 'rotary assistant' worked?
As the crafty Redditor demonstrated in a video, the Assistant-integrated phone works as and when someone speaks into the receiver, just like talking normally on a call. After that, the Google Assistant-powered device placed inside processes the command and gives a reply, which is blurted out using the head of the receiver (originally used for listening what the other person is saying on call).
You can say 'Hey Google' to trigger Assistant functions
The rotary dial doesn't do anything, but you can use all Assistant functions -attending voice calls, and playing music- by calling out 'Hey Google'. Also, once you are done, you can simply hang up the phone to cut out the speaker, silencing it completely.
However, audio output is heavy on bass
While the phone assistant works well, Movieman_75 notes some important caveats of the hack. Firstly, the user said, the receiver's audio is taken up by the far-field microphones of Home Mini, instead of the mic built into the receiver itself. Also, as the speaker of the receiver isn't designed for hi-fi source like Google Home, its audio output is pretty heavy on bass.
