Product idea: Talking discs
Many offices and public settings are putting up clear plexiglas barriers to insulate staff from the spread of disease. While we can easily see through these partitions, it ends up creating a lot of yelling.
What if there were a disc, about the size of a hockey puck and the thickness of a few coasters… it would come in pairs, be low-powered and Bluetooth enabled. Stick one on one side of the glass, one on the other. It’s a microphone and a speaker… boom. At scale, they’d probably be really cheap.
One extension: allow the disc to also hook up to a wifi router or laptop. Now, you can have a disc at your home office and your colleague can have one too. Tap it to turn it on, and if the other person chooses to unmute, you can have a casual conversation the way we might in the old office-bound days.
It’s pretty easy to imagine creating a simple app that could record and create a transcript of every transaction, which could be useful for bureaucracies and public records.
Another extension: Integrate it with real-time translation and now the disk allows you to talk to anyone in any language…