Pozio Cradle preview – deafen your assistant and stop eavesdropping
The Pozio Cradle solves the problem of accidental smart assistant wakeups on your phone and apps listening to you, as well as adds charging capabilities. It does this by directing sonic warfare at your phone’s microphones so there’s little to no chance of your phone hearing the wakeup of “Hey Google,” or “Alexa.” It also has the ability to stop directing blocking audio by simply saying “Pozio stop”.
Once Pozio Stop is called, you’ve got about a minute of time to talk to your assistant before it re-triggers.
We reviewed another product of theirs called the Pozio Shield a while back which did the same for puck-shaped Smart Assistants such as the Echo Dot and the Google Home / Nest Mini. There’s not a lot different in terms of functionality here except the addition of a Qi charger, which turns this into a more useful device in my opinion.
My main goal today was to see if I could ever get a phone to trigger while in the dock. That’s a negative although I did discover saying “Pozio Dock” is close enough to “Pozio stop” with the Cradle to be mistaken for the “stop making noise” trigger word.
I recorded a video to highlight what things sound like inside the Cradle. Should you want to watch it, it’s a roar, might want to lower your speakers until it hits just to make sure.
I have thusfar been unable on either the Cradle or the Shield to trigger anything accidentally. The case could be argued with the video above that if someone were listening they could make out what you’re saying, which is true. This doesn’t totally kill audio so this is primarily a weapon against your phone triggering randomly as someone might be able to hear what you’re saying from a distance, but the audio gets worse and worse step by step away from the unit in my testing.
The Pozio Cradle is not a connected device. You do not have firmware, you don’t have WiFi, no Bluetooth. There’s nothing to hack, no network entry vectors, etc. It’s basically like suspending your phone in a blender and turning it on. A fancy noise machine aimed at privacy.
I’ll be doing more testing on this, but I’ve been wanting to do a quick video and hear what it’s like inside the bubble since the previous Pozio products.
You can see pricing and options over on Pozio’s website, and I’ll have a review beyond “it works” in the next week or two.
