Alexa is my friend

"Alexa is my friend" is a comment that many of the seniors who were interacting with the tool said. It seems there are times when it is nice to have a friendly AI to talk to — and to have her play music; tell you about the weather; adjust your lights, and tell you a joke when you need to hear one. So, if you are alone, perhaps this interaction is a way to combat loneliness.

There are many groups looking at this issue, AARP Foundation has a program for "Social Connectedness Voice-activated Technology", which has a goal of determining whether the technology of this type can help older adults fight isolation and loneliness. And Front Porch and the Consumer Technology Association Foundation are rolling out Alexa to senior living facilities in the hope of impacting loneliness and isolation via the Voice-activated Independence for Smart Home Engagement (VISHN) initiative.

This is a great place to start. As Tech Life worked with seniors and the Amazon Echo Show, with its excellent video-call capability, they realized that there is now the potential for something even better than humans interacting with an AI. That is interacting with Other Humans (with Alexa's Help)

The seniors working with Tech Life, when talking about Alexa, inevitably someone will say: "But I don't really want to talk to a machine. I want to interact more with other people."

In its latest form, Tech Life believes that Alexa has the potential to help facilitate deeper, and more frequent, human to human interactions.

There are two aspects to the combination of Alexa and the Amazon Echo Show that made Tech Life excited about the potential for more (and better) engagement between older adults and their friends and family.

The biggest and most important capability is a super simple, video call capability. You just say "Alexa, call John" and (so long as you did the initial setup correctly), Alexa places a video call to the "John" you had in mind, and his face appears on the Echo Show and you can interact with him.

My friends and I make conventional phone calls, with a voice command, and it is very easy. However, as we age and, in that ageing, develop physical or mental imperfections might make it harder to make a phone call with more conventional technology this voice capability becomes more important.

Life happens and as we age, we circle of friends and family grows smaller. As we age many of us now have close friends and family members who live somewhere sufficiently far away to make face-to-face meetings less frequent than we would like. What many of us want are more (and/or deeper) interactions with those distant friends and family members.

In my opinion, technology has a real role to play here. I talk to my daughter who lives in Australia, but we have deeper and more meaningful conversations when we video chat. Now we use Facebook Messenger now, but earlier we used Skype. Alexa and the Amazon Echo Show seems like the next easy transition to make.

I know that the "perfect" technology does not yet exist, and the "best technology that does exist" seems to be too complicated for many people to want to use. There is a sort of adoption barrier, the height of which relates to how hard people think the technology is to use.

For many years video calls were the best way (so far) to Interact at a distance and people found this out when Skype made this option available to many of us. Apple started offering its FaceTime option and then others followed. Facebook now offers a video messenger as does Alexa and the Amazon Echo Show and I am sure many other social media platforms offer this option as well.

I (and many others) have found that video calls are the next best thing for staying in touch — both with family members and with friends and acquaintances. It seems there is a depth of connection you get with a video that is just not there with a conventional voice call. And video calls seem to make it easier to just "hang out", even if you don't have a specific set of information to impart.

But here is the problem. Today's video call technology, while enormously better than in the recent past, is still intimidating to many of the older adults.

I am not a big Apple fan, but my wife and son are, and my son uses Facetime and tells me it is remarkably simple and has excellent quality. And for a one on one conversation when both parties are comfortable using Facetime, he is not sure it can be improved on.

The potential for Alexa and the Amazon Echo Show is for the many seniors are just not comfortable using Facetime, or are not in the Apple world (competitors like Skype are harder to use in my opinion), and many don't have a smartphone or a computer with a camera.

The big advantages of a video call on the Amazon Echo Show are the simplicity: "Alexa call John". And the specific hardware implementation (all in one; no need for smartphone or computer; loud and high-quality sound).

A quite different challenge that many of the older adults are interested in addressing is how to make new friends, or meet acquaintances who share common interests.

One of the challenges is that the people who we can easily interact with (because they live close by, or attend the same church or Village meetings you do) are not necessarily the people we share interests or have the personality traits that will make them our best friend.

In our society, older adults are often segregated by age, and people make the assumption is that we will want to hang out with others just because we are of a similar age. But what if, like me, you care less about a person's age than about their interests or opinions or type of personality?

Affinity groups as a way to meet new people is an intriguing idea. Would it be interesting to be part of a group characterized not just by age, but by something you care about such as a common interest or shared experience? Today there are many examples of this. There are Meetups. And there are various online "meeting" sites, where you can make new friends. And we think these are excellent ideas.

But what if the Meetup you want to attend is too far away? Or if it is at night and you don't like to go out at night?

This is where we are wondering if the Amazon Echo Show might play a role. Maybe this could be the tool that makes it easier to attend meetings remotely, opening up a new group of potential human-human interactions?

There are many ideas, but Tech Life’s opinion, the largest issue, especially for a target demographic of older adults, is the complexity of getting Alexa set up in the first place. Maybe this is not a huge deal. But it would certainly be an excellent improvement if the setup process could be made simpler.

Tech Life came to the conclusion that the combination of a voice-activated AI — and the easy video call a capability which that AI can facilitate on one's behalf — might be a real game-changer as we seek tools to reduce social isolation. Time will tell if they are right, but I think they are on to a great idea.