What Ellis is

In one sentence

Ellis is a voice-first helper for the part of a week that is spent on the telephone. You say you need a refill, and Ellis rings the pharmacy and asks for it. There is no screen to read, no menu to learn and nothing to type.

The everyday things

• Ask for a refill, and Ellis rings the pharmacy instead of you sitting in the queue
• When the refills have run out, Ellis asks the doctor’s office for a new prescription, then asks the pharmacy again once it has had time to arrive
• From the family’s own phone, have Ellis ring the doctor’s office to book a visit or move one that is coming up
• Hear what is coming up in the diary, and be reminded the evening before and again that morning
• Ring one of the people your family listed, from your own phone

They are small things. The point is that there are a lot of them, and that each one currently costs a phone call, a hold queue, or somebody else’s afternoon.

You ask. It does not watch.

This is the line we care most about. A great deal of technology sold to families works by reporting on an older adult to somebody else. Ellis works the other way round: the person starts every request, and nothing is set up to observe them.

What family can see is what the person can see. There is no view of them that they do not have themselves.

Nothing happens without a yes

Before Ellis telephones anybody, it says who it is going to ring and what it is going to ask for, and waits. Speech recognition misfires, and it misfires more with quieter voices and with accents that are under-represented in the systems doing the listening. A confirmation step is the difference between a misheard sentence being a moment’s annoyance and it being a call nobody wanted made.

Family, without taking over

Most families end up in one of two bad places: an older adult managing alone longer than they should, or an adult child quietly running someone else’s life from two states away. Ellis is built for the space between. Family can follow along and help when it is wanted, while the person it belongs to stays the one deciding.

What Ellis is not

• Not a medical device, and not a medical alert system. It does not call for help in an emergency. If falling is the worry, the right tool is a worn alarm that can be pressed.
• Not a source of medical advice. Anything about medicines or symptoms belongs with a pharmacist or a doctor.
• Not a monitoring product. Nothing here reports on somebody without their knowing.
• Not a replacement for people. It takes the admin off the visit so the visit can be a visit.
• Not a way to buy anything. Ellis never pays, orders or agrees to a cost on a call, and it does not order groceries or anything else. Collecting and paying for a prescription stays between the person and the pharmacy.

Where to get it

Ellis is on the App Store for iPhone in the United States. It is free to download, and using it is a subscription bought through Apple: the price is in the terms and on the App Store. The person who sets Ellis up and the person who uses it each need an iPhone, and Ellis makes its calls to US phone numbers.

The conversation on the home page is an illustration: it makes no real telephone calls. The real thing is on the phone.