[velo_aprx]

My parents are 20 years younger than this aunt and if I introduced these types of changes to make it "easier" for them, I would have to help them out even more. My mother would have even bigger technophobic breakdowns because of her not understanding how things work. And if anything, she would love to revert back to 1980s technology that is straight forward instead of having to learn some high-tech magic voice assistant of teh phuture to change the channel.

I say, keep it simple, keep it familiar. I am 100% sure this will backfire.

[Yizahi]

I had an experience teaching my grandma in her 90s some basic tech. There were no smart devices at that time and no assistants, but I'm pretty sure that assistant would not work for her. First of all because she is not English speaker, second because it is unpredictable tech, meaning that any query may end up in completely different result, which would block her.

Instead what she used most were stateless devices. Devices which you can turn off, then turn on, and then she would see the exact same starting point and have exact same path to the target. For example call on a dumbphone - she knew that she needed to unlock it via a corner button then press down on a joystick as many time as that person required. Same with TV, she knew approximately what buttons to click to get to some channel.

She had bad eyesight and it would make voice assistant even worse, because she wouldn't see what happened after each command.

[beAbU]

I agree. I have similar aged parents. I advised my dad to get one of those Android TV boxes, and I can't be happier. I spent an afternoon setting it up, getting all their streaming apps in the right place, and the number of TV related tech support calls went down to 0.

One remote that controls everything, it has like 5 buttons on it, and one of them is a netflix button. Fantastic.

And now my dad feels like a tech wizz whenever he casts a photo/video from his phone to the tv when he wants to show his friends something.

This article's solution feels very brittle and cumbersome, which will probably increase the tech support calls.

[bryanrasmussen]

1. it sounds like his aunt has a very complicated setup already, he simplified the setup.

2. 20 years younger than 94 might have significantly less medical issues - to quote the article "The problem was that she has difficulty walking, and when she is sitting in her lazy boy chair, it’s tough to get up and walk to the phone to see who is calling. She gets a lot of spam calls. She also plays the TV loud and may not hear the phone ring." etc. etc.

[sebstefan]

I'm not sure. I routinely have to help mine understand that one remote is for the TV and the other for the cable box. TV now just being a display for a video input is enough

Having one remote is big

Being able to ask Alexa to find the remote is also big, because I swear my grandmother loses that thing every week