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Comment by Jyaif | Hacker News Reader

That's a brilliant product. Assuming it's reliable and user friendly, that's the kind of product I'd give my parents (or even grand mother) so that they can easily video chat with the rest of the family.

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I gave my 90 year old grandmother an Echo Show for Christmas and she loves it. My main goal was video chat (which she can also initiate herself), but she’s actively using it as a radio, weather station and calendar for the trash pick up.

To help her remember the commands I made a reference sheet with the most common phrases, but what mainly helped her was to think of talking to Alexa as if she was talking to a dog: Giving clear, loudly spoken commands.

Did you see the recent SNL skit? I think that a real Alexa for Seniors would incorporate some of what this spoof Alexa does.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvT_gqs5ETk

Heh, the difficulty in remembering the wake word actually rings true. We tried it with „Alexa“ first which is somewhat difficult to pronounce for a German speaker who doesn’t known any English. „Echo“ however worked well and she had no problem remembering it.

Just wondering: Have you looked into the Echo Show or Spot?

Also, my theory is this story is coming out intentionally ahead of CES where Google will likely show a similar product to both this "Portal" thing and Amazon's Echo Show/Spot.

Google announced their version of this yesterday. they have a "smart screen" platform and are partnering with lenovo and a few others to launch products by the summer.

The Google Assistant is coming to new smart screen devices, too, with JBL, Lenovo, LG, and Sony all crafting Google Assistant smart screens.

https://androidandme.com/2018/01/news/google-assistant-smart...

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