As smartphones have continued to eat into the sales of landlines, voice mail has become the main way that voice messages are retrieved from phones. But once upon a time, the answering machine was a physical device, one that used cassettes just as the tape-based Walkman laid the foundation for the flash memory-based iPod nano.
The team behind OrbMi wants to recreate the experience of listening to voice messages that arrive without remote notification on one’s own schedule with a glowing half-sphere. Like the answering machines of yore, it must be plugged in. But unlike those devices, it doesn’t have to be anywhere near a phone or phone line. That’s because messages are sent to the Wi-Fi device over the Internet using a companion app.