Hi there,
I see it's been a couple weeks since this was posted but since I find myself in the same position as you I want to add my 2 cents worth.
My dad is soon to be 92 and we have just moved him to an assisted living apartment in July. He is mostly blind and his memory is failing him. Due to reasons beyond our control (and everything is in this covid time) he is either not hanging up his phone properly or the phone cord we sent so they could put his phone next to his easy chair is defective. The facility will not be convinced to go spend the few minutes it would take to troubleshoot the situation and therefore we have not been in contact for 2 weeks. Regardless he would be unable to call us and we have to call him...if the phone was working. We bought an echo show 8 so that we can call or drop in on him and so that if we are able to teach him to call us and his few other friends. I have been working with the echo for two days finding the settings that will make it as simple as possible. This is what I have learned and what I am doing.
1) We are changing the wake-up word to "computer". We are going to tell him it is a computer that will be activated by his voice and he can ask it things and use it to call us and he can answer our calls using his voice. In reality if we can only "drop in" on him successfully that will be enough. There is little chance he will remember the name "Alexa" since he has no past experience to draw on but since he worked using a computer that should be still in his memory about what a computer can do.
2) We discovered that if I have the alexa app on my phone and I put me as a contact with both my cell number and my home landline it will exclusively default to the cell number and will not find the home number. It will say something like "contact not available" and then will dial the cell number. However it will ask which number to use for my sister's contact which also has cell and home options. I believe this is because she does not yet have the app installed. We'll see on that. To remedy this I made a separate contact entry for my home line called "our family name" as the first name and "residence" as the last name and I marked it as a home line. I also put the relationship as daughter. Now if my dad says "Computer call my daughter" Alexa will respond "which number should I call, H....'s mobile, L...'s mobile or E.... residence home?" Perfect. We used the word "residence" because growing up we were required to answer the phone thus: "W.... Residence" and therefore we are again using something already in his memory and he won't have to learn anything new. It took quite some time to figure out why Alexa would refuse to find the home number but I think it has to do with the app being on my cell phone. Amazon wants us to use its products exclusively.
3) I set the echo up to greet him every morning with the date, time, weather and a short happy news item. I can change what it does as I see what he likes and doesn't like. I can also change the time it does that if I'm interrupting his breakfast too much ;-)
I hope everyone finds good ways to keep in touch as we continue to be sequestered during this annoying time. I'm happy my dad is safe but it is very trying, especially without his phone working. I do get to go visit next week but I live in a different state and my sister who lives closer to him is unable to drive to him due to her own vision problems.
If I find other helpful hints or I need to update anything I've said I'll post again.
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