Silo is part Amazon Echo, part vacuum sealer, all crazy

Here’s something that I think is true (but also isn’t true). Somewhere, there’s a dark basement with a monkey and a typewriter. Amidst flinging his own shit and screeching hysterically, the monkey spends his days pounding furiously on that typewriter. Then, at the end of each day, someone picks up the papers strewn haphazardly across the floor and types them into Kickstarter, all in the hope that it’ll land them their millions.

At least, that’s my theory of how Silo came to be, which is part vacuum-sealer, part Amazon Echo.

Yeah, you read that right. Weird, isn’t it? Like Doug Hutchinson and Courney Stodden, this is a most unlikely marriage. But unlike Doug Hutchinson and Courney Stodden, the Silo kinda makes sense and, dare I say it, could work?

First, the vacuum sealer part. Suppose you’ve got some leftovers that you don’t want to turn into your own personal penicillin colony: the Silo lets you put the food in a plastic Tupperware-esque container, and then, like a wildly inappropriate joke at a polite dinner party, sucks the air out. Through deep vacuum sealing, you can preserve the freshness of a bagel for up to 10 days.

The fact that the Silo vacuum seals stuff isn’t particularly impressive, because those things are common as muck. You can get one on Amazon for slightly over $20.

What makes Silo special is the marriage with Amazon Alexa, allowing you gruffly bark commands at the device. You can quiz it on how much food you’ve stored, as well as how long you can reasonably expect stuff to last.

The device also comes with spoilage notifications telling users when to eat their stuff, and when to throw it away, lest they spend the rest of the weekend chained to the toilet passing bowel movements that look like they came straight from the set of an Eli Roth movie.

The device is also a full Alexa-powered speaker, giving the user access to all their usual skills. The Silo can, for example, read you recipes or tell you the news.

Silo is currently being crowdfunded on Kickstarter. At the time of writing, there’s roughly a day left to back the project, which has already raised over $1 million. That’s impressive considering it initially only sought $80,000 from punters.

If you’re tempted to back it, you can find it here. As with any crowdfunding campaign, there’s an element of risk, but if the developers behind Silo pull through, units will make their way to backers by July next year.