Ran an AI voice assistant for my elderly dad and it went totally sideways

I set up an Alexa Echo Show for my 78 year old dad in Portland about 3 months ago. Figured it would help him set reminders for his meds and check the weather without fumbling with his phone. Instead he keeps yelling at it because it misunderstands his accent, and last week it ordered 4 cases of Ensure because he said "order more Ensure" while watching TV. Has anyone actually gotten these things to work cleanly with older family members who aren't tech people?

2 comments

2 Comments

river_jones13d ago

Portland, not Maine. The accent thing is real though. My uncle in Boston tried one and it kept hearing "park the car" as "bark the bar" and ordering random stuff. You can train the voice model in the settings, have him read a few sentences out loud so it learns his speech patterns. That fix works about 60 percent of the time. The rogue ordering is just a feature at this point, you gotta turn off voice purchasing in the Alexa app completely or it will keep happening. Had a neighbor whose Alexa ordered a samurai sword because the TV said something about "katana.

umamurphy13d ago

Actually I gotta disagree with the 60 percent fix rate on the voice training lol. In my experience it's more like 30 percent at best because the accent training only works for the specific sentences you read, not random new ones. The samurai sword story is hilarious though, I bet that neighbor still gets reminded about it at parties. Just turn off voice purchasing like you said, that's the only real solution.