Amazon’s Echo Show Makes It Easy to Keep Family Together While Social Distancing

Staying home and sheltering in place during the coronavirus pandemic is hard on families, especially those with older relatives living alone. My mom lives a couple of towns away, but I haven’t hugged her in more than a month—it’s been even harder on my 8-year-old, who is pretty inseparable from her nana. To help us all stay connected, my husband and I bought them matching Amazon Echo Show 8 smart displays so they could use voice commands to easily have video chats with each other. It has been a bright spot during this really weird time, enough that my in-laws in England have also gotten Echo Shows. Now they talk to my daughter and chat with my mom. These smart displays have completely changed how we connect with family—even across an ocean.

What is the Amazon Echo Show?

The Echo Show is one of our top-pick smart displays (we also recommend the Google Nest Hub Max). These are devices that sit on your desk, countertop, or table and let you use many of the same types of apps and features a tablet would. Their standout feature is voice-activated video calling, an easy way for families to stay connected with isolated relatives. Jonathan Kanter, director of the Center for the Science of Social Connection at University of Washington, told us video calls are the most beneficial way to combat loneliness while people are practicing social distancing. “Ideally we are having live face-to-face interactions with each other,” he says, “but given that’s not possible, the closer we can get to live interaction, the better.” A text message is better than nothing, he says, and a phone call is better than a text, but a video call is the best.

The simplicity of using a smart display for video calls is ideal for kids and grandparents, and it’s why my family loves the Echo Show right now. Kids can activate it as easily as any other Alexa device, so busy working parents don’t have to start or mediate all of the family chats. If your parents or grandparents aren’t the most tech-savvy, once you’ve set up the voice control, it’s easy for them to use, too. Kanter says, “I think for some people who are not used to this technology, any technology that is easier to access and implement will be beneficial.” We parents can get some free time when we know our children are occupied, and the grandparents are happy to stay in touch—everybody wins.

How do I set these up for my family?

Amazon has detailed instructions for remotely helping your loved ones set up their Echo Show, but if it’s at all possible we recommend having their device sent to you so that you can do it, even if you then have to ship it to them. By default the Echo Show arrives configured to your own Amazon account, but you can select the “This is a gift” option when purchasing to avoid that. When we gave one to my mom, we had it sent to our house; my husband used her Amazon password to log in to the device, and he set up her contacts for video calls before delivering it to her.

The initial setup is straightforward, with prompts to log in with your Amazon account, but you have to use the Alexa app to do it. Adding the contacts for video calls is the slightly trickier bit. This is a separate setup in the Alexa app under “Communication,” and you can choose to import whole contact lists or manually add some. We opted to manually add just a few to get everyone started.

You can use the Echo Show to make regular video calls or to drop in on people. The drop-in function lets you listen in and see another Echo Show’s camera almost instantly, whether the person on the other end is ready or not, but a video call actually rings the device and requires someone on the other end to answer. We recommend that you disable drop-in, especially if you don’t like surprises or if you have more than one Alexa device. Alexa randomly picks one device to connect to, so your remote relatives might suddenly appear in your bedroom, say, or on your desk during a meeting (that happened to my husband) instead of on the kids’ device. On the other hand, my mom has only the Echo Show and loves getting random drop-ins from my daughter all day long. Kris Thompson, a Certified Aging-in-Place Specialist (CAPS) and smart technology specialist with Oak Hill NEAT Center, also likes the drop-in feature, especially for loved ones who might be hard to reach on the phone. “That has been huge for people,” he says, “especially families that live all over the place.” It’s also a good idea to let elderly relatives know ahead of time you’ll be making a video call so they don’t have to run through the house to answer.

Why not stick with FaceTime?

If your family is used to using apps like FaceTime or Skype to stay in touch, or if you’re worried about security issues with Alexa devices, you might want to skip a smart display. We’re fortunate enough to have a playroom, and we keep our Echo Show there rather than in our daughter’s bedroom, so she uses it only during the day when we can tell what’s going on, and we don’t have to be creeped out by the thought of it listening to her at night. But in addition to giving younger kids more independence with the Echo Show’s voice activation, the option to talk hands-free—with a big, stationary camera instead of a cell phone—is really appealing. And Kanter says the image size and quality are important for togetherness: “The longer this lasts, the more we’re going to want to increase our screen sizes,” he told us, noting that it’s hard to have virtual family dinners while holding a cell phone.

Also, if your family is like mine, not everyone has an iPhone. Between all the grandparents and siblings we video-chat with, we use FaceTime, Google Duo, Skype, and Google Hangouts, depending on who uses what platform. But everyone in our family has an Amazon account and a cell phone, which is all you need to get started.

Kanter’s ideal would be to use big-screen TVs for the most lifelike video chat possible (we have advice on how to do that). Our top-pick Echo Show has only a 10-inch screen, but we think it’s comfortable for video calls, and it’s simply more practical for most families right now. My family opted for the Echo Show 8 because it costs about half the price of the original Show, and its 8-inch screen is bigger than that of the Echo Show 5, which we also recommend (it has a 5-inch screen). If you’re buying an Echo Show as a gift, we suggest getting two (if you don’t already have one)—one for you and one for them. Amazon sells a bundle with an Echo Show 5 and an Echo Show 8 together for less than the cost of a single Echo Show, a solid value if you don’t mind the smallest screen size.

One thing you can’t do with an Echo Show is group chat; Echo Show video calls link only one device to another device. If you’re trying to get family members from multiple locations together, we recommend a Web-based video conference application.

Sources

1. Jonathan W. Kanter, PhD, director of the Center for the Science of Social Connection at University of Washington, phone interview, April 15, 2020

2. Kris Thompson, CAPS, smart technology specialist at Oak Hill NEAT Center, phone interview, February 28, 2020