>> private secretary
I joke that my 95-year-old dad has two girlfriends: Alexa and Siri (or "Series" as he calls her).
Bit by bit my brother has been transitioning him to Apple, but until recently Alexa ran his thermostat, garage door, appointments, weather reports and so on.
He gets a kick out of being able to say: "Alexa, add an appointment at 10am on July 27 to see the dentist." This, by the way, was the use case that got my brother to change him to Apple Homekit - it integrates better with the calendar on the iPhone (or so I'm told... I'm way behind my 95yo father in my tech adoption as it turns out).
It's made me think of the massive change over the course of his life.
I was helping a friend put on a roof yesterday and nobody wanted to use a corded drill even though the batteries on the lithium drill running the seamer were overheating.
I realized that my grandfather used cordless tools and I use cordless tools, but my father's generation was the only one that had used corded tools for most of their working lives. It struck me that corded tools had only lasted 1-2 generations depending on how you count it. Even when I was a kid, my grandfather, who had grown up in the trades but become an engineer, built furniture and a dog kennel and other things with the tools he was familiar with - hand saw, hand drill, hand sander. He had a few power tools, but mostly hadn't bothered.
And now my dad says, "Alexa, close the garage door," and it happens.
