The TRICA Phone Booth
A restored 1960s rotary coin phone at TRICA, a youth performing arts facility in Boise, Idaho.
Pick up the handset and you get a dial tone. Turn the dial once and the phone answers: a joke, a story, today's weather in Boise. One topic per digit, and the operator on 0 reads the current directory aloud so you never need a card on the wall.
The phone is real and so is the dial. It rings through to no one — every number plays a recording that someone at TRICA made or wrote.
How it works
The phone connects through an analog telephone adapter to a voice provider, which calls a small program each time a digit is dialed. That program picks a recording for the number and plays it back down the line. Staff manage the recordings from a private web app; nothing about the caller is recorded or kept.
For TRICA staff
The admin site is at admin.tricaphonebooth.com. It is limited to approved accounts — signing in with a Google account that is not on the list will be refused.