Walk Into Your Home, Turn Your Phone Off
How I made this with Listen + MagicMirror:
Everyone has their own special method for dealing with their phone. I like to turn mine off. For the past four years, I’ve tried to keep my phone off for all of Saturday (at the very least). I still find myself reflexively grabbing for it on those days, hitting the home button and watching as the screen stays gray.
I used to spend a few moments Friday nights reminding coworkers and my mother that I’d be turning off my phone soon. If I forgot to do this, I’d turn my phone on to find escalating series of text threads moving swiftly from, ‘just checking in’ to ‘are you alive?!1!’
To solve this, we built Listen. Now I can set up an auto-response before I turn off my phone so that anyone who calls or texts my phone number hears my message, ‘Phone off for Saturday.’
However, there still exists the issue that I don’t have the luxury of a life where my phone can actually be off without anxiety. My family is in Michigan (and I’m in New York), so phone is the only way they can reach me. Listen is only a three-person company so any issue with the site is immediately my issue, especially since good support is a core value for us.
A nightmare scenario would be turning on my phone to find out something had melted down on Listen and no one answered users’ requests for help or a family emergency had occurred and my family wasn’t able to reach me.
So, I built Listen-Magic. Listen-Magic is a module for MagicMirror. Using a Raspberry Pi hooked up to a display and Listen’s API, Listen-Magic shows me texts from certain chosen contacts to my phone number. This way, my phone can be off but there’s a way for family and work to reach me in case of emergency. Everyone who texts me still receives my auto-response so they know where I am–and I have no anxiety that I might be missing something immensely time-sensitive from my most important contacts.
Something like this should be in every home. We’re working on creating a way for individuals to generate access tokens for their Listen number so that anyone can use Listen-Magic.
In the meantime, I encourage everyone to explore MagicMirror. It’s great. Listen-Magic was the first thing I ever really coded myself (though I did get lots of guidance from Austen) and MagicMirror’s forums + documentation helped make that possible for me. I plan on making more modules for mine (and hopefully yours!).
