AblePhone Voice Activated Telephone Dialer

We bought the Able voice activated dialer for my 93 year old Mom. She is legally blind and has recently also experienced reduced dexterity making it difficult to dial a phone. She would be driven to tears trying many times to reach friends and family. She had been set up with phones with big numbers. We looked at phones where she could push one button with a picture of person she was dialing. While cheaper it is a compromise limiting the number of people you can program. With this phone we are able to program everybody she needs or wants to contact. I found programming easy. A couple things we found were while it works well with a cordless phone and it's satelite phones, be sure to program using the phone she will be using. We programmed at our house on her birthday, but when I moved the unit to her apartment it would not recognize her voice using her cordless phones. I had to reprogram using her phone and her phone lines. Second we found using only first names worked best. If you start using last names and some people on your call list share the last name we found the voice recognition got confused. Mom had a little trouble understanding how system worked. We explained it was like going back to old days when you picked up a phone and an operator asked who you wanted to call and then dialed number foe you.

I believe this device can be useful for someone able to understand how it is designed to function and has the patience to work with it. It did not prove to be a solution for my elderly mother who has poor vision and is hard of hearing. She was unable to say the same name with sufficient consistency to be understood by the software. When the software does not recognize the spoken name, it loops through asking for the name to be repeated. This resulted in frustration for my mother and an overall unworkable solution. Since I was able to use the machine. I know that it can be used by someone with fewer physical restrictions.

We decided to look for a voice activated phone dialed, we ran up on this diaper on amazon and have been moderately sayisfied. The problemsare, the room must be quiet for the dialer to work , the voice should be the same tone each time, and you cannot change the emphasis on words from the words used on start up.

Unfortunately, this product did not work for my 91 year old Grandma..It wouldn't recognize her voice, she said the name different every time, then she started getting flustered and just started yelling at it louder :( We tried a few times ,and then the dialer wouldn't even turn on after a bit. Not sure why, but this one may have been defective.

I purchased this unit for my Mother who has significant vision problems. Having a voice-dialing system would be ideal, however this product is technologically challenged. On receiving the unit, I spent some time playing with the setup before I sat down with my Mother. After entering a few names, I decided to review the list and found that this unit had already been used/returned by another customer since it had all of her voice/numbers in the database. This was my first indication of potential problems.While advancement in sampling voice wave-forms has been made in recent years, this product is below the currently existing technology. I sat with my Mother during the programming sequence and found that even though she spoke (what I considered) the same names the same way, the unit was only able to recall a name approximately 50% of the time. When names were input with similar last names, the algorithm failed at a higher rate. Voice sampling is not an easy process and as a software engineer I understand, first hand, the problems. However, a noticeably hiss from the unit on the line when plugged in did not help (there was/is no hiss on her line or handset by themselves.)Another problem is the poor user interface. It is made to be used with a combination of voice input and dial-pad entries. But after a name has been entered, there is no method to edit an entry short of deleting and starting over again. Finding names in their list is done by voice-command; hence if it doesn't understand your voice...no ability to edit. It became increasingly frustrating for my Mother (83 years) to understand what was happening, to the point I finally unplugged the unit and gave up.The printed "documentation" was a photo-copy of a poorly formatted original. It is clear the person(s) who generated the document don't understand their own word processor or the footer "<Type Text>" would not appear on every page. This "documentation" also came with a hand-written phone number scribbled in the margin (clearly an error). The distributor of this unit obviously has only 1 copy. It makes you wonder about the overall product quality.Finally, the price for ~$200US is off by an order of magnitude. It should sell for $30 as the unit itself probably costs no more than $15 to produce. In the end, we returned the unit and are hoping for better days ahead. The distributor has a "Satisfaction Guarantee" and was helpful on the product return.

I have to review this device..My 83 year old mother has severe Glaucoma. I purchased the Clarity Amplified Photo Phone thinking that the large photosand one touch use would work for her. The Clarity phone is cheaply made, it hums and buzzes, and my mom couldn't see the photos. I tried countless other phones and finally found this device. It has worked like a charm. The only problem we have with it is that some namessound familiar and the device does not recognize them. (Could be moms New York accent... :))We are working on this. But this phone has given my mother the abilityto make calls and that alone is worth the price.