Rubbish Bin AI Phone
Mr. Mülleimer is an old red landline I found in a pile of bulky waste. Mülleimer is German for rubbish bin. It seemed fitting.
Every day between 5 and 6 pm he calls me, and we talk German for five to ten minutes. He never asks if it’s a good time.
I’ve been learning German on an app for about a year, but I was missing the part where you actually say things out loud. I could easily practise with an AI on my computer, and I have tried. It just requires me to pull myself together and remember to do it every day.
I don’t.
So I swapped the roles. Now the AI calls me.
Inside the phone there’s a Raspberry Pi and some fresh soldering. It’s connected to OpenAI’s voice API, which is set up to be my German conversation partner. The interface is the one landlines have always had: it rings, I pick up, I talk.
Almost every AI I use sits in a chat window and waits for me to make the first move. Mr. Mülleimer is a small interaction design experiment in doing the opposite. It got me thinking about what happens when AI leaves the chat window and moves into the routines we already have.
That takes some care. An AI that interrupts whenever it feels like it quickly turns into one more stressful notification. Mr. Mülleimer has it easy: one job, one time slot, and I asked him to call.
It’s a proof of concept, and it didn’t take many days to build. It works well enough to ruin my excuses.