My Mom is in a nursing home and can barely pick up and hold the room landline phone for a few minutes due to Parkinsons. She asked us to buy her a cell phone as it will be lighter and she can park it on or near her bed.
Mom needs one key feature for her to make and receive calls: a high quality voice recognition system that can hear her weak voice. When she makes a call (family will program in phone numbers she will use for family and friends) she needs to simply say "call Suzy Smith" in a low voice and it will do so.
When Mom has an incoming call from family, she should simply have to say one or two words (like "Hello" or "Answer phone") and that will connect her with the caller. And ending call to be done by saying "end call", etc.
Of course, the phone should also be size of a smart phone as she can't hold the tiny basic phone she used to have. Mom will need the other usual things disable people need, like large display letters/numbers for visibility. She can't use keypad buttons, or scrolling, due to Parkinson's. Thus critical need for voice actuation.
Is there an online company that sells phones only and is known to be the best of all such companies, whose customer/technical service help is uniformly outstanding and has a large selection of product so we can have full confidence they will select the proper phone to buy and know for sure the phone has this feature?
For example, if I want to buy a camera, B&H Photo in NYC is #1 in the world. If I want to buy a car stereo, Crutchfield has amazing employees that know their product inside out. I am not seeing a company that specializes in phones with such consistently exellent technical help.
There is a vast amount of phones for sale online, and I've read through a ton of articles to find the right product, and need to hand this off to a product expert at this point.
We got Mom a Jitterbug which looked promising a few years ago, but it has no voice recognition feature that we could see, and it required an upward swiping motion to get to the key menu's where she can select who she wants to call. Once again, Parkinson's rules out any use of the fingers.
https://parkinsonfoundation.org/
" You can make phone calls from an Echo device or the Alexa app, giving you hands-free options for calling family, friends, and other people. ... The Alexa app supports Alexa-to-Alexa calling on an iPhone with iOS 9.0 or higher, and an Android phone with Android 5.0 or higher.Jun 21, 2021"
Maybe a 2 way speaker plugged into the phone?
Is there a speech therapist associated with the NH? Maybe she can give you ideas.