Triby Family

A clever Alexa-enabled kitchen radio with a few novel features – and a few notable flaws

- Barry Collins

Invoxia’s Triby Family wants to become a fixture in your kitchen,with two fiercely strong magnets on its rear to clamp the device securely to your fridge. And that’s far from the only quirky thing about this Alexa enabled device.

The Triby is designed to be at the fulcrum of family life, not only playing music and answering inane voice queries, but also acting as a messaging hub. To the left of the monochrome 2.9in E Ink screen sit two telephone-shaped buttons. These are effectively speed dial buttons for different members of the household, using Invoxia’s own VoIP service to place calls to the person’s smartphone via the Triby app.

The VoIP service was largely fine if the call recipient was connected to Wi-Fi, but over mobile data glitches and dropped calls were common. The Triby app also had problems with the aggressive power saving on my Galaxy S7, registering a missed call rather than ringing the handset when someone was trying to get hold of me.