The old rotary phone came to life with AI: how the Modern Rotary Phone was turned into a music player and voice assistant

As the world races to release yet another “smart” gadget with a glass face and zero charisma, designer Nico Tangara takes an old rotary phone, like something out of a 70s movie, and packs it with a voice-activated AI system and music player. The result is a hybrid that’s at once reminiscent of grandma’s kitchen, an OpenAI server, and a Raspberry Pi interface—just without another cold black rectangle on the table.

The Modern Rotary Phone project, presented on designboom, continues Tangara's long-standing line of combining analog objects and digital control systems: this time he took a vintage rotary phone, restored the mechanics, removed parts incompatible with low-voltage electronics, and built a Raspberry Pi-based minicomputer inside with a ChatGPT-based voice interface, speech recognition and synthesis systems, and a music player. The most interesting thing is that the main method of interaction remains the same as half a century ago: the user still spins the disk, but now the dialed "numbers" are converted into digital commands and requests to the AI, and the handset serves as a full-fledged voice headset for communicating with the "digital interlocutor" and for listening to music.¹

The author himself describes the Modern Rotary Phone as a “hybrid of analog body and digital brain,” and it’s not just a pretty image: inside, there’s a fairly complex disk pulse processing system, audio track, and internet connection, but on the outside, everything looks as if time has stopped somewhere in the days of wired communication and mechanical bells. In a world where home assistants have turned into identical cylinders and tablets, it almost looks like a rebellion against the sterile aesthetics of “digital home appliances” – and, judging by the audience’s reaction, a rebellion that’s quite successful.¹

How an old rotary phone was turned into a "smart" device

Modern Rotary Phone began with Tangara obtaining a genuine vintage rotary phone and initially treating it as a restorer rather than a “modder”: he kept most of the original internal components, replacing only what was incompatible with low-voltage digital electronics – primarily the high-voltage ringing mechanism and corroded wiring.¹ The native reset mechanism – the same one that is triggered when the handset is placed on the cradle or the front button is pressed – was left in the device's logic: now it serves as a "hard restart" of the digital part, while maintaining the device's recognizable behavior.¹

The biggest challenge was to read the pulses from the disk's rotation – the same sequences of short bursts that once corresponded to the digits of the license plate – and convert them into digital signals that the Raspberry Pi could process.¹ At the output, each digit that the user types on the disk became a "key" in the device's conventional command language: a certain combination starts music playback, another activates the voice assistant, and yet another switches the operating mode or adjusts the volume.¹

What's inside: Raspberry Pi, new sound, and old "wrapper"

To process the voice and control the system, Tangara used a Raspberry Pi single-board computer: initial tests were conducted on a Raspberry Pi 4 model, which provided fast data processing, but he later switched to a more modest, but more energy-efficient Raspberry Pi 2 - sufficient for home voice assistant and music player scenarios.¹ The phone's original speaker and microphone were replaced with modern audio components connected via an external USB sound card, which provided both better sound quality and easier compatibility with the Linux system on board the Raspberry Pi.¹

They tried to make the internal layout as “delicate” as possible: the restored original parts – the hook, springs, part of the bell mechanics – are placed next to the microcircuits, cables, and USB module so as not to spoil the weight and balance of the device.¹ Photos of the interior show a kind of "laboratory baroque": brass screws, metal elements, and a plastic base, to which compact boards, adapters, and neatly assembled bundles of new wiring have been added - this mixture creates the feeling that the phone belongs to two eras at once.¹

Voice AI: ChatGPT, Whisper, and Google Text-to-Speech

The voice part of the Modern Rotary Phone is powered by a combination of three well-known systems: the ChatGPT speech model is used as the "brain" of the voice assistant; the Whisper service is used as a speech recognition system (converts the user's voice into text); and Google Text-to-Speech is used as a synthesizer that returns the answer in spoken form.¹ This configuration allows you to “call” not a person, but, in fact, an AI interlocutor: the user types the appropriate command, speaks into the receiver, the system recognizes what was said, generates a response, and voices it via the same route that the voice of a live subscriber was once transmitted.¹

On a sensory level, it's a rather surreal experience: you spin an old record, wait for the conventional "beep", and then you're talking not to your grandmother or a PBX operator, but to a language model that can explain the news, find a song, tell you the weather forecast, or briefly summarize an Internet query.¹ The classic analog tube works as a natural filter from unnecessary visual information: no pop-ups, only voice – and perhaps that is why the idea evokes so many positive reactions from the public, tired of endless screens.¹

Music player: how the phone's disk became a "remote control"

In addition to voice chat, the Modern Rotary Phone works as a full-fledged music player: the dial performs the functions of navigating tracks, playlists, and playback modes.¹ The developer configured the logic so that certain numbers correspond to specific actions: conventionally, "0" is pause, "1" is next song, "2" is previous, others can switch playlists, change volume or operating mode (for example, local library or Internet radio).¹

This use of the disc turns an old phone into a physical controller for a digital player: no touch panels, just the rotation and clicking that our bodies have learned over the decades as intuitive gestures.¹ For an audience tired of the total "screening" of everything - from the kettle to the refrigerator - this tactile, "analog" way of controlling digital functions looks much more pleasant than another menu in the style of a "smart" speaker.¹

Analog-digital hybrid as a design statement

Modern Rotary Phone is not Tangara's first project in this niche: he previously showed a "digital-analog" Polaroid camera based on Raspberry Pi, where the old camera received a new digital filling with its own program code and control logic.¹ In the case of the phone, the designer is again playing with the same idea: to leave a clear, familiar form and interface, but to change the "engine" of the device so that it speaks the language of modern services and protocols.¹

For the world of industrial design, this is an important gesture: instead of inventing a new plastic box with a screen every time, you can turn to already established cultural “icons” and fill them with new functionality.¹ In the end, everyone wins: users get an emotionally charged object with character, and technology companies get another channel of interaction with people that doesn't look like a clone of another smartphone.¹

Why is this interesting for the Ukrainian public?

For Ukraine, where you can still find live rotary phones in old entrances, Modern Rotary Phone is almost an instruction manual for "capturing" nostalgia in favor of modern digital services.¹ First, it is a signal to local craftsmen: transforming outdated technology into interfaces to the latest systems is not only an aesthetic, but also a completely practical direction for the development of a culture of homemade solutions and small products.¹

Secondly, it is a reminder that not every “smart” device has to be just another touchpad – physical interaction, tactility, familiar “analog” behavior often weigh no less than a long list of functions in the description.¹ And if even voice chat with AI can be "squeezed" into an old telephone handset, the limits for further experiments with form and function seem to exist only in the imagination of developers.¹

Sources

1. designboom: "vintage rotary telephone transforms into analog-digital hybrid music player and AI voice chat"