Does your smart speaker hold a martini glass?
Hendrick’s, purveyor of “unusual” gin, launched its first venture into modern technology.
Horatio is a semi-smart, finger-activated (“freeing your voice for other things”) amplifier aimed at the rich and jaded.
“Created as a delightful counterpoint to today’s banal and predictable voice-activated speakers (yawn),” the product page said, Horatio promises a level of unpredictability “that mass-produced modern electronics fail to deliver.”
Ask Alexa what the weather is, and she’ll give it to you straight. Demand Siri tell a joke, and she’ll try to make you laugh.
Horatio, meanwhile, might comment on your outfit, inform you that “the fitness center opens at the ungodly hour of 5 a.m.,” or tell you “it is a good day to carry an umbrella in one hand and a cocktail in the other.” And he’ll do it with a swoon-worthy British accent.
The statement piece was released by Hendrick’s new Department of Not-So-Convenient Technology.
“Rather than breaking new ground, we prefer to cavort imaginately on existing ground,” Mark Stoddard, the gin-maker’s ambassador to the Western United States, told journalist Tony Bowles.
“Horatio perfectly demonstrates our entirely unnecessary response to what we see as a gaping hole in the modern technology market,” Stoddard continued. “The speaker even includes a built-in cocktail holder, an innovation that we expect to rock Silicon Valley back on its knees.”
Only five exist in the world—each made from “lovingly salvaged” antique copper, brass, leather, and wood “collected over many years.
“Indeed, no two are exactly alike,” according to Hendrick’s.
Snag one of these rare handmade “works of art” for $1,113. Or wait for its inevitable arrival to eBay.
This isn’t Hendrick’s first foray into the bizarre: As Bowles pointed out, the company has previously introduced dirigible airships, hot air balloons, pedal-powered cocktail apparatus, and “vast amounts of other fascinating and utterly inefficient machines.”
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