Who we are

We are imagineers.

We design the immersive experience, build the hardware, write the AI, and read what people feel as data. Experience design and deep-tech engineering sit next to each other in the studio. The room, the character, the way an interaction feels in your hands. The systems behind that, the ones that hold up under load and survive the edge cases nobody saw coming.

Eindhoven, on Strijp-S, is where this kind of work belongs. Rooted in the Philips heritage of the city: people who fabricate, prototype, and ship in the same week. The studio is small on purpose. The team that scopes the project is the team that builds it.

We build the behaviour before the voice: presence, touch, and small models that read the room.

Proof · running today

It already runs unattended.

P.I.M. is a rotary phone in the foyer of Parktheater Eindhoven. A visitor lingers, the phone rings, they pick up and talk for a minute. No host, no screen to poke, nothing to yank off the wall. It is the clearest proof of what the studio builds: an object that holds a real conversation in public, on its own.

For 26 days in January, 613 visitors picked up. The theatre called the feedback 142% richer than its written form.

Read the P.I.M. case

Why interaction

What changes when it reacts to you.

A label you read, a screen you tap, even a classic animatronic, they run the same loop for everyone and forget you the moment you walk on. An object that senses and responds turns a passing look into a real exchange, and an exchange is what people carry out and talk about.

A static display

You read, you leave.

A plaque or a screen tells the same story to everyone. One way, and soon forgotten.

A classic animatronic

It performs, you watch.

A fixed show on a loop, the same whether you lean in or walk past. You watch it; it never watches you.

A Reckon Limbic object

It notices, you connect.

It senses who's there, reacts to you, and reads the room. The visit becomes a conversation people actually remember.

One engine, three ways in

One studio, three ways in.

The same voice and behaviour engine sits behind a single object and a whole room. Start small or start big; the step up is a matter of how many artifacts and how much journey, not a different studio.

Object · event

A single artifact

One talking object for a foyer, a fair, or a launch. Short run or single event. The way in.

How voice works Signature artifact

A permanent presence

A heritage object that reacts to presence and touch before it ever speaks, co-funded as a marketing asset with a service contract behind it. Bring us an object with a story; we give it senses, behaviour, and a voice.

See a talking artifact Experience system

A whole route

Several artifacts, a route or a room, designed to capture what visitors carry out. The corporate and attraction work.

See the work

The stack

The stack is Reckon Limbic.

Reckon Limbic runs underneath every object we build, in three moves: capture, engage, gather. The object reacts on its own, reads the room on the device, and turns the whole interaction into data you can act on. P.I.M. proved people will talk, and a conversation pulls 39% more informative answers than a static form (Xiao et al., 2020). Limbic is what comes next.

Capture. The object reacts before a word: presence, motion, touch, and the knock-back, driven by small models on the device itself. The first exchange is physical, long before the voice.
Engage. It reads the room on-device, expression and mood, faces blurred so nothing leaves the machine. Switch Board weaves verified lines into a live voice, so you can't hear the seam.
Gather. Voice, emotion, vision, and interaction pool into one read: mood over time, what moved the room, the moments that landed. As a crowd, never an individual.
A dashboard you can act on. Top themes, standout moments, and the next thing to change, by Monday. A rating tells you nothing; the whole interaction tells you plenty.

About Switch Board AI Voice AI deep dive

Newest demo · on the bench

A sealed chest that listens back.

Reck-in-a-box

The living chest

A sealed wooden chest with a motor arm inside that pushes back when you lift or tilt it. Double-tap the lid and it opens a conversation; a camera notices you're there; an emotion engine drives how it reacts. The strongest argument that we build living artifacts, not screens with speakers.

Reel coming summer 2026.

Things we built

We ship real hardware and tools.

The proof that we build and not just pitch: things that live next to a coffee on the desk, in daily use inside the studio. A portable voice AI audio tour installs on exhibits a venue already owns; the rest are tools we wrote for the way we work.

Thing we built · workbench

Reck Connect

A station-and-satellite cockpit for working with Claude. Built for the way Reckon. itself codes, used daily inside the studio.

See Reck Connect Thing we built · object

Reck Reader

A small reading device paired to Chrome over Bluetooth. Words appear at the pace you choose; the screen knows when you stopped.

See the Reader Thing we built · tooling

Custom Claude tools

Internal apps, dashboards, agents, and integrations on a brief. Small surface, sharp edge, real adoption.

What we build

Who we build for

Three rooms we know well.

The buyers with a budget for visitor experience, not culture subsidy: brands, attractions, and the heritage places with a story worth hearing.

Corporate & visitor centers

Brand presence

A third presence that tells your story all day, adapts to a child or a recruit or a buyer, and keeps your people's knowledge after they leave the room.

Leisure & attractions

Crowd proof

Tough, no-touch interaction that survives a public crowd. Voice and presence, nothing to yank off the wall. Science centers, zoos, indoor attractions, the recreatie floor.

Heritage & theatres

Object as hook

The object is the hook and the story is the product. A talking heritage piece, co-funded as a PR asset with a service contract behind it.

How we work

How a build runs, sprint by sprint.

No big reveal at the end. We work in short sprints with working code in front of you, never PowerPoint, reckon honestly with the constraints (legal, technical, cultural, physical) as we go, and hand it to the team that owns it after we leave.

Discovery sprint, two weeks. Honest reckoning with workflows, constraints, and feasibility. Output: a one-page brief and a clear go or no-go.
Build sprint, four to eight weeks. Working software each week, demoed to the people who'll use it. No big-bang launches.
Run, ongoing. Hand-off to your team or a small monthly retainer. Honest end-of-life when the thing has run its course.

Claude-native today, but we're not religious about it. The right model for the job, including local models when privacy or latency demands.

Where it goes next

We're just getting started.

Reckon Limbic is built to grow. Three of the next pieces are already on the bench.

Advanced characters

Objects with a deeper sense of who they are, and how they behave across a whole visit.

Dynamic memory

It remembers the room across the day and the season, not just the last sentence.

Smart guardrails

Stays in character and in bounds, even with a crowd trying to push it.

Frequently asked

Sharp answers to the practical questions.

Are you an agency, a consultancy, or a software house?

None exactly. We're a small AI engineering and experience-design studio. Closer to a boutique product team than a consultancy. We build working software and physical objects, not slide decks. If you need a partner who can also stand in front of a camera and explain it, that's also us.

Why hire a small studio instead of a bigger agency?

Most agencies split conceptual design from hardware execution across two teams, sometimes two firms. The meetings between them tend to eat around 70% of the budget. Reckon. does both crafts under one roof: the people who scope the experience are the same people who write the AI and build the hardware. Fewer translation layers, more making. We bring in trusted collaborators for specific shapes (industrial design, fabrication, additional engineering hands) when scope demands it.

Do you do animatronics today?

Not as a shipped capability yet. It's a direction we're moving toward, anchored in our voice AI work and our Eindhoven fabrication network. If your brief is animatronics-led, we'll be honest about where we are versus where we're going. If your brief is voice-led with movement as a layer on top, that's something we can plan today.

What about RFID-aware environments and sensing rooms?

In flight. We have RFID and sensor prototypes on our bench, and the same Claude-native stack that powers our voice work extends naturally into spaces where objects know each other. The first commercial deployment of this work will be public when it ships.

Do you do data infrastructure projects?

Only when they sit underneath an AI use case we're building. We're not a generalist data team. If your problem is a five-person data engineering project, we'll point you to people who specialise in that.

How does GDPR work in your builds?

From day one. Data minimisation, anonymisation, retention windows, and processing-region awareness are all part of the discovery sprint. Cultural-sector clients have signed off our setup. We can share the architecture under NDA.

Got something to build?

Tell us what you want built.

From a single talking object to a whole experience system. Heritage, leisure, corporate. lets@reckon.works.

Email lets@reckon.works Other ways to reach us