Goldfish: a recorder where every voice owns its words
Goldfish is a pocket voice recorder for conversations with many people in them: meetings, dinners, conference hallways. Each person in earshot decides how much of their own words is kept, and the device forgets on a schedule. It began as a speculative product in the NPC Memo, built on one belief: "All of us should have agency over the resolution at which our words are remembered."
The product
- Form: a yellow pebble, 14 cm long, with no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth and no speaker.
- Control: plain speech. "You can quote me", "keep my words to just the decisions", "leave me out of this", "this is off the record". Pressing the eye takes the whole room off the record at once.
- Feedback: a ring of light around the seam, one segment per voice. Colour and fill show each person's level, from red (off the record) to blue (verbatim).
- Memory: who said what for three days, the gist for a month, then only the decisions. Forgetting means destroying keys, not just deleting files.
- Access: a phone held to the tail while someone holds the eye down. Nothing leaves the device any other way.
The Resolution Protocol
The rules behind Goldfish are written up as an open standard, with Goldfish as one profile of it: - Every voice gains an identity and its own record, and controls that record. - Anyone can lower the level; nobody can raise anyone else's. - A raise for others applies at once, but anyone can undo it, retroactively, for thirty seconds. - When the device is unsure who spoke, a lowering applies to everyone and a raise is ignored.
The gap it fills is specific. Telephony's recording standard treats a participant's "don't record me" as advisory. Meeting software offers consent or leave. No existing system lets one person remove only their own words while the conversation carries on. Grammars for each language are data, and behaviour is pinned by test vectors that two independent implementations pass.
What exists
The Goldfish workbench is a single page holding: - the specification and parametric CAD; - an interactive 3D model; - a simulated five-person meeting; - a device simulator for phones; - print files with print settings and print services in Berlin; - a parts list with buy links; - a geometric review and an electrical simulation that run on every build.
Status
A works-like and looks-like prototype: the enclosure, wiring and protocol are designed and tested in software; the device firmware is not yet written. Next steps: - a kit-friendly build with plug-in connectors and no surface-mount soldering; - a ring cold-read test with strangers; - legal review of the default recording level; - a low-power architecture for multi-day battery life.