Ginny Conrad lives in Atlanta with husband Ben and their two children, Zach, 3, and Eliza, 1, and two pups. Conrad works as a professional fundraiser for cystic fibrosis, while Ben works as an actuary. When they’re not busy working, the couple likes to spend quality time as a family doing things like spending time in the pool and at local parks.
April is Autism Awareness Month, and it holds special meaning to the Conrad clan. Zach was diagnosed with autism at 18 months. (Ginny herself recently discovered her own neurodivergency, having been diagnosed with ADHD.) Like many modern families, the Conrads are invested in smart home technology to make daily living more convenient and accessible. After considering their options, they settled on Amazon’s Alexa to act as showrunner, so to speak. Alexa was the only one at the time that could stream music throughout the house; the Conrads loved the idea of having a surround sound system pervade their entire home. Beyond the niceties Alexa provides the family as a whole, however, the real power the digital assistant wields lies in how she makes the world accessible to Zach. Like its peers in Apple and Google, amongst others, Amazon has fortified Alexa with a slew of accessibility features.
“Over time, Alexa became an integral part of our house. There’s not a day that goes by where we aren’t interacting with her several times a day,” Conrad said to me in a recent interview conducted over email. “We love to play games and we started getting into the habit of playing Jeopardy every day while we cooked dinner together. Zach, even as young as age 1, loved this activity. We have lots of videos of him getting excited and running around as soon as we started playing.”
She continued: “[We] never realized how important this device would be. It became a part of his daily therapy and it encouraged him to make an effort to communicate more. Alexa served as a huge motivator for him by encouraging back-and-forth conversation.”
In and of itself, smart home tech can prove accessible across many contexts. In Zach’s case, not only is Alexa helping with the smart home component, communicating with Alexa is actually strengthening his receptive and expressive language skills. He loves his Echo Show and the Amazon Kids user interface, according to his mom. In addition to his beloved Echo Show, Zach also interacts with several Echos and Echo Dots strewn throughout the house. All told, Zach’s affinity for Alexa has grown with time, maintaining a “constant” presence in his everyday life.
“Through the [Echo Show], [Zach has] been able to discover music on his own (he has quite the eclectic taste), he’s learned to turn the lights on and off, and he’s even learned to make phone calls and announcements,” Conrad said. “He once prank called a local Mexican restaurant and we’ve never heard him laugh so hard. He loves the Amazon Kids interface as well—he finds his favorite YouTube videos and watches them that way. It’s incredibly easy for him to navigate.”
In addition to promoting prosocial language, Conrad explained Zach’s interactions with Alexa has helped him gain other crucial skills. Besides communication, Conrad told me Alexa helps Zach in areas such as joint attention, speech therapy, independence, and stimming. “[He] will start a sound or song over and over again because it makes him regulated and happy,” Conrad said of Zach’s stimming, idiosyncratic and repetitive behaviors that are especially common in autistic people. “We never discourage him from stimming or using [Alexa] in this way because it helps his mental health and helps him process his environment. While it can be annoying to us at times, it’s self-care for him.”
On Alexa’s impact on Zach’s speech therapy, Conrad said he has significant communicative delays make therapy “extremely important for his development.” Alexa has proven an invaluable tool in facilitating progress. “Using Alexa during [Zach’s] speech therapy sessions, he is able to learn the importance of a back and forth conversation and turn taking,” she said. “He’s learned by trial and error that he has to wait until Alexa is listening for him to communicate what he’d like to say. Games on Alexa, like animal sounds, can also be a phenomenal way to encourage vocalizations from someone learning verbal speech.”
All is not peachy keen with Zach and Alexa, however. Conrad lamented how they wish Alexa could better understand synthesized voices like the one produced by Zach’s AAC device. “Zach’s communication is 100% done through his ‘digital voice’ via his AAC device,” she said. “She often has trouble understanding what he’s saying unless we are directly next to the device.” Conrad also would love a feature akin to Apple’s Guided Access accessibility feature on iOS, whereby parents (and educators or therapists) can disable certain hardware and software controls simply by circling them. ”Zach thinks it’s funny to turn the volume to the maximum setting sometimes and we end up having to unplug the device and remove it from the room until he stops,” she said.
You can follow along with Zach and family’s adventures on the @raisingautistics account on Instagram and TikTok.
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