Alexa for Old People: Make everyone’s life easier

Amazon’s Smart-speaker gives you access to Alexa. Alexa for old people can save thousands of pounds of care and make your loved one’s life easier. All for just £40.

In this article, we run through some of the best ways to use Amazon’s Alexa.

Getting Alexa for old people into the home:

The first thing you have to do is buy and set one up:

1. To buy an Alexa Echo or Dot speaker, click here
2. To set it up, click here to watch a very good video

Assuming that you have set Alexa up, you will want to use her to make your life easier. To keep it simple, the Alexa Echo is great at 5 things:

1. Making calls
2. Setting reminders
3. Playing Music
4. Accessing information
5. Playing games

Making Calls:

Say “Alexa call X”

This is the most complex of all of the functions you will want to use but is probably the most important, especially in an emergency. To enable your loved one to make calls through simple voice commands, you will need a smartphone in the home. To set it up, check this link out.

Setting reminders: 

Say “Alexa, remind me to do X at Y time on Z day”.

This can be incredibly useful to the individual, however, as a family member, you can set up a number of regular reminders yourself:

• On day 1 you are going to want to set a daily wake-up alarm
• Set up a daily medication reminder
• Create a daily reminder to drink water
• Remind them to take lunch

There is no limit to the number, or type, of reminders you can set up.

Music:

Say “Alexa play Radio 4” or, if you have Amazon Prime, say “Alexa play Frank Sinatra”. You will also want to control the volume, to do that say “Alexa volume X” with X being a number between 1 and 10.

As standard, you can listen to any radio station by saying “Alexa play Radio (then hte station you want to hear)”, in addition, if you have Amazon Prime, you also have access to pretty much all the music that has ever been created. Alternatively, you can link Spotify, iTunes, etc by installing an Alexa skill. Check this video out for details.

To open a skill, say “Alexa open the Spotify skill”.

Accessing information: 

Alexa is connected to the internet, so can answer just about any question you might have. However, it isn’t really smart enough to do that very effectively. Having said that, it is very good at a number of core requests:

• “Alexa read me the news”
• “Alexa what time is it?”
• “Alexa what date is it?”
• “Alexa what is the weather like”

Games and entertainment:

As a bonus, you can play games and have Alexa tell you stories:

• Our favourite is a guided story you can access by saying “Alexa, open the magic door”.
• Another one is “Alexa, open Escape the Room.” where you get to solve a series of puzzles.
• 20 questions: Say “Alexa, open Akinator” and it will set to work guessing what it is you have in mind, with simple “yes” and “no” responses from yourself.
• They also have versions of “who wants to be a millionaire”, “deal or no deal” and multiple genre-specific quizzes like ones on happy potter.

Click here for a guide to more fun and games you can have with Alexa, it is always a great idea to turn up armed with one or two to play.

Setting up Alexa is one small part of setting up the home and making it safe. There are plenty of other ways to get technology into the home to make everyone’s life easier.