Winifred

A home assistant that ran in a house, and nowhere else.

She was built to answer questions about the family's own records — shopping, calendar, tasks, the medications the house was tracking — to speak her answers out loud in her own voice, and to keep every bit of it on the box in the cupboard. No account, no cloud, nothing sent anywhere.

She is switched off. Not because she failed, but because building her taught us what the thing actually had to be — and what came next is smaller, cheaper, and can hear you from across a kitchen with the television on.

What grew out of her is Disyard: one box for the house, her own voice and ears, a screen in the kitchen, and a telephone system that keeps working when the internet does not.