Did the author try none of those? As for dialing, the intelligent assistants for both OSs provide a robust and easy to use audio interface - "Hey Siri Dial Taxi".
Maybe I missed something in the sentiment of the article?
She also can barely hear, so giving voice commands might work, but understanding the machine-generated audio feedback doesn't work. Also, she can't fix problems, like accidental activation. It's too overwhelming. And that's while she's technologically curious and adopted mobile phones and smartphones to some extent. She just can't use these things properly.
I bet we will have an easier time with these things because we learned how to use them while everything was fine.
My mother is 87. She's still pretty sharp, but anything other than a simple flip phone is very frustrating for her. Things just move too fast, too many things "pop up" (like notifications, etc) and she doesn't know the different types of gestures needed to control it well.
As a blurry eyed person in my midlife period who consumes a lot of written word, text and code I very much appreciate any efforts to make it easier on my eyes and my brain, especially in type that is nice to look at.
https://input.fontbureau.com/preview/
I find an extra bit of built in spacing helpful.
What happens when your vision is too poor to read even the best designed font?
At that point 100% success is an unrealistic level and so a discussion about how smart assistants work or even other assistive functionality is a fair discussion and one the author did not mention at all.
Yes. Yes, it is.
For some reason we're sold on the idea of "good enough" for things that are actually "just barely usable under perfect conditions". And this doesn't apply only to voice assistants.
She had a Windows Phone for years because you could zoom-in the tiles and thus increase touch targets for quick dialing. That eventually broke down, too, because of lack of haptic feedback and, well, we all can hardly imagine how hard it is to navigate a device like that when everything's so blurry you cannot see the space between huge-ass tiles on a, what, 6" screen or so.
Other than that, in the real world, they seem to rarely work. You can come up with a curated list and make sure it's all working correctly. But as soon as you do something novel, all bets are off.
In the original post's case calling contacts is a trivial exercise and one that works 99% of the time accurately. Reading and sending texts is also a rock solid feature.
Again my main issue with the article was that these assertive features were not even discussed.
And even if your accent is 100% Silicon Valley denizen, any app that uses your input for searching will possibly have ambiguities or incorrectness on the results, and currently there are very few tools to correct misunderstanding, even if it doesn't mishear.
And that is assuming that search results are even deterministic, many apps either randomize (or "personalize" for business interests) or update their search logic regularly enough for it to be a problem for a casual user.
Calling a taxi to the wrong destination (for example) is very much not acceptable, ever.