“I was wondering how “senior” friendly the echo shows are. My 88-year-old mother is Not in the least bit technical.”
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tldr; Depends on the senior and the situation. With support (especially with setup, which is complicated), many seniors can operate an ES even if they're not very technical. However, if the senior has impaired hearing/vision/memory or they're living in a care facility that may not allow ES, the ES may be a bad fit. Can your senior order food from a McDonald’s touchscreen? Can they speak simple commands like, "Alexa, drop in
"? If so, they can probably learn to *** operate an ES ***. ** Setting up an ES *** is much harder, though. I recently walked my mom through ES setup. From long distance, by telephone. She has a flip phone. At first, we couldn’t get texting to work. Turned out she needed to upgrade her data plan. We needed to link her number to her Amazon account. That’s when we figured out that she’d been giving me the wrong mobile phone number. During the Alexa app setup, I had to keep logging in as her on my phone’s Alexa app and switching between her account and mine. Many challenges, we had. But between us and Consumer Cellular (we love those folks!), we finally got the ES working for drop-in video calls. It was so nice when we finally got drop-in working and I could see my folks on the screen! To run ES, the senior needs a mobile phone number. This number needs to be linked to their Amazon account (amazon.com > Your Account > Your Profiles > their profile). They need a cell phone and data plan that support SMS/texting so they can receive verification codes from Amazon, Alexa app, etc. If the Alexa app is available for the senior’s phone, install it. (I didn’t do that for Mom because I didn’t think to check whether the app was available for flip phones. I configured Mom’s Alexa ES drop-in settings by switching between her Alexa account and mine on my phone. When I logged in as her, Mom gave me the verification codes from her phone. Getting to the Alexa home screen after login is a royal pain if you haven’t set up voice profiles, but with much gnashing of teeth, I bumbled my way through.) So yeah, your senior will need setup support, from you or somebody like Geek Squad, Amazon, etc. Brace for some frustration, but if your only problems are technical, rejoice. My folks use the ES strictly for drop-in video calling, so I can't comment on whether other ES features are senior-friendly. Once the ES is set up and connected to Wi-Fi, it seems to stay working a long time despite power outages, etc. as long as the IT infrastructure (router, Wi-Fi password, etc.) doesn't change. Be aware that seniors can have any number of issues that may impede their ability to use an ES. How is their hearing? Their vision? Their memory? Do they have dementia? If they’re in a care facility, does the facility allow ES? Sadly, there are some seniors that ES is a bad fit for. As we discovered the hard way when we set up an ES for my MIL. In addition to being tech-illiterate, MIL has dementia with severe memory loss as well as severe hearing loss. ES audio can’t be amplified or equalized. There’s no real-time captioning for drop-in calls. (I think there might be captioning for YouTube videos and movies, but we didn’t play with that.) You may be able to work around dementia memory issues with simple paper instructions. (We couldn’t, though — lack of memory plus technical illiteracy was just too high a hurdle.) If your senior is in a care facility, check with them before purchasing an ES. Not all facilities allow ES, especially if the senior is sharing a room with another resident. (Once MIL moved to a private room, her facility did allow ES for her.) We connected easily to the facility’s public Wi-Fi. Bandwidth is sufficient for video calling but not for streaming movies. (Of course, if your senior has their own cable internet connection, they’ll probably have enough bandwidth.) Alexa language can be reset from English to a senior’s preferred language. However, if the younger generation doesn’t read that language, it will be harder for them to support the senior’s use of the ES. In our situation, MIL can read Chinese but only minimal English. My husband can read English but not Chinese. Whenever we communicate with MIL, we’re roundtripping between Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, with help of Google Translate and a whiteboard. For a while, MIL also kept unplugging the ES at night because the light bothered her, and of course she didn’t remember to plug it back in again the next day. (We solved that problem by putting the ES on a timer and securing it to the wall outlet.) After a lot of thrashing, we’re still using the ES with MIL, but mainly as a digital photo frame. We’ve done the occasional drop-in call to her, but all we can do is wave at her and hold up a whiteboard with writing on it. (And that’s if we can even reach her at all; often she’s away from her room.) Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.Hi Mar, to setup the Echo device you will require access to a mobile phone. Once setup it is easy to use.To set up your new Echo device, follow these steps: 1. Before setup, download or update the Alexa app in your mobile device app store. 2. Plug in your device. 3. Open the Alexa app . 4. Open More and select Add Device. 5. Select Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Plus and more. 6. Follow the on screen instructions to set up you device. Have a great day!
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