![the phones make a great conversation starter.](https://res.cloudinary.com/dey9hupke/image/upload/w_600,h_400,c_fill/v1589832232/imakethings/53862C5B-4EB1-429A-8470-0EE88D62B5D5_1_201_a_qudj5j.jpg)
![electronics assembly](https://res.cloudinary.com/dey9hupke/image/upload/w_600,h_400,c_fill/v1589832261/imakethings/2E389AD2-0FA8-4363-8EEC-99A8127B76CF_1_105_c_ww8tld.jpg)
My best friends and I always stay in contact. But sometimes, a small personal greeting can get lost under a pile of text messages, WhatsApp stickers, snapchats or Instagram DMs.
THE LINE makes sending short, ephemeral personal messages fun again and is a great conversation starter for parties.
The system consists of four modified rotary phones each painted in a different bright color. The antique internals were replaced with modern single board computers and the numbers on the rotary dials were replaced by emojis.
The phones connect to a central service called THE OPERATOR, which is a public Telegram bot. If a user wants to send a message to one or more of their friends, they simply send a voice memo to the Telegram bot. After choosing the recipients, the corresponding phones ring.
When the earpiece is picked up from the phone, the operator with ever-changing moods (voiced by the Google Cloud TTS service) reads the messages to them like an answering machine. Whoever answered the call can respond to each of the messages with a single emoji.
THE LINE is a whimsical and tactile way to deliver simple short messages to your best friends.
Built by Dario Breitenstein / H. Franz / L. Fluri