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Is Google Home Fit For Elderly and Disabled Users? (vortex.com)
Chances are either you or someone you know received a Google Home over the holidays. Not only are they being marketed heavily by Google but they seem to have appeared in almost every "Holiday Gift Guide" on the internet. Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein brings up an interesting dilemma: is Google Home fit for the elderly? Weinstein writes: You cannot install or routinely maintain Google Home units without a smartphone and the Google Home smartphone app. There are no practical desktop based and/or remotely accessible means for someone to even do this for you. A smartphone on the same local Wi-Fi network as the device is always required for these purposes. This means that many elderly persons and individuals with physical or visual disabilities -- exactly the people whose lives could be greatly enhanced by Home's advanced voice query, response, and control capabilities -- are up the creek unless they have someone available in their physical presence to set up the device and make any ongoing configuration changes. Additionally, all of the "get more info" links related to Google Home responses are also restricted to the smartphone Home app.
Yes! A /. story I'm at the bleeding edge of.
My upper 80s grandmother lives in an assisted living facility. After trying a Google Home myself, I immediately bought one for her about a year ago. She absolutely loves the thing. She only uses it for the weather, to turn her TV on and off (I set up IFFTT), and occasionally stock prices and other facts, not anywhere near what it is able to do. Nevertheless, she loves how simple it is for her to have access to stuff she previously found confusing (TV remotes), precise weather info isn't easy to get if you don't have a smartphone, etc. I also don't get calls anymore about how to use the TV.
I haven't yet had a circumstance yet where I needed to make configuration changes that couldn't wait till the next time I visited and the one time it stopped working Grandma knew enough to unplug it, wait a bit, and hope it would work and it did. And there's lots of things I can set up remotely if I need to.
I previously tried giving her an Amazon Echo and while she occasionally used it, it was very frustrating to her because Alexa seems to require you to speak things in a certain way. However, the Google Assistant is much more flexible in the phrasing and order of words. She's had mini-strokes in the past and doesn't always use the exact words you'd expect for what she's trying to say but you do understand what she's getting at. Google seems to get her meaning better. (That's not to say it's perfect. There are times it doesn't understand her, but its success rate is way higher than Alexa). Additionally she's a very devout woman and the Google Home (which plays sound from YouTube) has a much better selection of religious stuff than Amazon's offerings, because YouTube has a large collection of such material.
If she weren't living in a single room in a assisted living facility (with staff to help her), I'd start installing smart devices like the Nest and anything else you could control with the Google Assistant in her home, because she really seems to get it in a way she doesn't with other things.
Also, on my end, Google (and Alexa) store audio recordings in the cloud of what was asked. I like being able to check her Google account to see if how she's doing (i.e. if she's following her usual patterns) without having to bother her. Yes, she knows that I can do that and approves.
I could go on and on about this but besides moving her into assisted living, the Google Home has really been the next best help for us. I always joke with her that if someone had told her, even five years ago, that she would be talking to an air freshener when she's in her upper 80s, she would think she got dementia in her old age. But instead she's the most with it person there! What a change in her lifetime! I want to get her into a self driving car next.