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Comment by yowlingcat | Hacker News Reader

Very wholesome. Makes me realize it'd be useful to make an intercom system for my home.

We have a 1980s style intercom that a prior owner installed. It’s an eyesore and not even that functional. I also installed whole-house audio in 2009.

Both have been entirely superseded by a bunch of Amazon Echo/related devices, which work quite well for that purpose and background music (some rooms I was able to interface with the whole house audio, but overall I wish I had that money and time back).

As we do painting around the house, I remove the intercom panels and patch over the plaster.

I've long desired the functionality that the Echo & Echo Show provide when it comes to audio playback and intercom/video chat functionality. Unfortunately, I'm too suspicious of Amazon (and Google, for that matter) using me and my data for their own purposes. I hope to find an off-the-shelf solution some day.

> Unfortunately, I'm too suspicious of Amazon (and Google, for that matter)

For Christmas, my mom decided to get us both a Google Home and a Facebook Portal (with Alexa built in).

We already have an Echo Dot that lives on our fridge that my wife's parents gave us.

Anyway, I thought it was a bit interesting that out of the "big three" evil data stealing tech monopolies, the Google Home was the only one that made me uneasy. I suppose it's a carry over from the whole Firefox / Chrome rivalry.

I don't really care for the Echo Dot we already have, but it is admittedly quite useful for "Hey Alexa, play Christmas music" or "Hey Alexa, set a timer for 10 minutes."

Also I have been legitimately impressed by the video quality and performance of the Facebook Portal because any time I've tried to use their video chat from my computer it's had roughly a 30 second lag and been completely unusable. The Portal is both a crisp picture and no noticeable lag.

I guess the thing I should wonder most about that is why video chat from a traditional computer is so terrible. The only thing I've ever had work decently for video chat with family has been Skype.

I bought a home last year. It had been pretty well maintained, but even so it had layers of forgotten technology I had to remove. Doorbell chimes that no longer worked. The panel to a long-disconnected alarm system. Phone jacks that hadn’t been used in a decade, at least. Layers of unrelated coax runs from various satellite and cable companies.

It’s remarkable how much of a difference you can make just by skimming off the layers of antiquated crud in a room.

It’s kind of wild to me how often these things are left in place even as they’re retired.

I wish it was more common to have conduit runs for cables rather than just having them strung randomly through walls and crawl spaces. That would make upgrading from one technology to the next much easier.

We wired my parent's place during construction in 1999. A mix of mostly plastic conduit with wires fished inside and a couple of runs that were not in conduit.

Out of 56 total drop locations (many with multiple cables), we've seen the need to fish new wires down the conduits exactly 0 times in 21 years. That makes for a tough RoI calculation, especially if we'd been paying for all the labor to do the conduit installs.

Makes me realize it'd be useful to make an intercom system for my home.

Whole-home intercom systems were fairly common through the 1970's. I'm not sure why they went out of fashion.

If you're not a tinkerer, and you're in the Apple ecosystem, you can get a HomePod Mini and it will do the coordination so that all of your iOS devices can become one big intercom system, even if you're not at home. Kinda like Nextel used to do.

> I'm not sure why they went out of fashion.

Good question. Maybe smaller families and fewer multi-family/multi-generation households?

I lived in a ~3k sq ft 5 bedroom 2 story house with a total of 6 to 7 inter generational family members for a few years and it had an intercom in all the rooms. It was cool when we moved in, but after a few days no one ever used it.

Yelling was easier than going all the way to the intercom button, but even then it’s not often that you need to communicate with everyone that would justify installing an intercom system.

Echo devices work for this as well, and can be accessed via any other Echo or through the Alexa app.

Presumably much cheaper than HomePod Mini too; I’ve seen the Echo Flex for as low as $10.

I think the answer is simply mobile phones obviated those sorts of intercom systems. Either I can yell to the person, or I can just call/facetime them.

However Apple recently introduced an Intercom / Announcement system to their homepods, so we'll try that at some point. I feel like it won't be more than a novelty unless someone knows that I'm in e.g. the garage.

I had them in several houses over the years and don't think it was superseding technology that was the problem.

Intercoms were:

- kind of ugly and bulky

- fixed in place - you needed to walk over to the panel and push a button to use; but now you're already by the door (where the panels were installed) and can probably just yell faster/easier

- the person you're reaching might have volume turned down, so you resort to yelling anyway

- you might be on the phone or taking a nap and would have to turn down to volume to avoid interruption

- poor speaker/sound quality, so horrible for music playback

- poor build quality and buttons/dials would regularly fail after 5 years or faster if used

- finicky to setup with tons of manual tweaking required to get volume levels where desired

- expensive to repair & proprietary

- expensive to install

I had completely forgotten that we actually had one back when I was living with my parents, because the cordless phones we had allowed you to call out and take calls, but also call any other cordless phone attached to the same base station.

We didn't think much of it at first, but it was actually super useful because going upstairs was relatively inconvenient and shouting didn't work if we were wearing headphones.

Today I guess we would just whatsapp each other.

I would almost prefer to make my walls selectively “invisible” to sound. It would require the ability to quiet/mute as desired, but it could also be nice to just talk toward to my kid’s room, my wife’s office, etc. and be heard.

If you have multiple Echo devices you can do “alexa announce _____”

my parents had an intercom system in the house when I was a kid. they regretted it as soon as my siblings and I figured out how to operate the phones!

The Apple Watch has a walkie talkie mode which works for person to person communication.

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