A PLAIN GUIDE
AI companion for dementia
We make one of these, so read this the way you would read a bakery's guide to bread. We have tried to earn the skepticism: what the category actually is, the questions that protect your family with any provider, and where the honest limits are.
The kinds that exist
Three different products get called an AI companion for dementia. Robot companions (a seal, a cat, a tabletop robot) live in the room and help with presence and touch. App or tablet companions offer conversation and games on a screen, which works while a screen still works. Phone-based voice companions answer or place ordinary phone calls, no new device, no new learning, which matters because the telephone habit survives deep into dementia after most other technology has fallen away.
Everlineis the third kind, with one distinguishing choice: the voice that answers is not a synthetic stranger, it is a family member’s own recorded voice. KindredMind makes the same choice; we compare ourselves with them honestly at Everline vs KindredMind. Services like ElderVoice and inTouch place outbound check-in calls in an assistant voice, which suits families whose main need is reminders rather than answered calls.
The questions to ask any provider, including us
Whether the loved one is told what it is: this is the ethical line, and a provider without a clear answer has answered you. Whether the family consents and controls setup. Whose voice speaks, and where the voice data lives. Whether you can read the conversations. What happens in an emergency (the honest answer is that no companion is an emergency service, and the provider should say so). What a bad month costs, and whether a ceiling protects you. And what happens to everything if you cancel. Our answers are on the trust page and in the longer guide, which includes the ways we think a family should test us.
What an honest one can and cannot do
Can: answer with all the patience in the world, at any hour, in the language of childhood; hold the worry gently without correcting their reality; give the family their workday and their sleep back; make the real calls warmer because nobody is running on empty. Cannot: be in the room, notice a fall, replace a doctor, or love anybody. A companion is comfort between the humans, never instead of them. The question of whether that comfort is honest is one we answer at length in is it okay that an AI answers when I can’t.
What Everline is, plainly
You record your voice in a guided ten-minute session. You tell it your loved one’s world: the names, the dishes, the stories, the topics to avoid. Then when they call and you cannot answer, they hear you, in English or Vietnamese, as warm on the thirtieth call as the first. Every conversation is transcribed for your family alone. It costs $79 a month with 200minutes included and a spending ceiling you set yourself. It began as one daughter’s answer to her mother’s 30 calls a day; that story is here.
Questions families ask
Is an AI companion deceptive for someone with dementia?
It can be, which is why disclosure is the line we refuse to cross. In our view a companion is only ethical when the family consents and sets it up together, and every family member is always told what it is. Ask any provider how they handle disclosure before you ask anything else.
Do AI companions replace visits and real calls?
No, and be wary of any product that implies they do. A companion covers the hours nobody can: the fifteenth call during your workday, the 2am worry. The goal is that the time you do spend together is warmer and less worn down.
What should an AI companion for dementia cost?
Phone-based voice companions run roughly $79 to $180 a month in the US. Whatever the price, insist on a hard ceiling: dementia means call volume you cannot predict, and an honest provider caps your bill instead of profiting from a bad week.
Does the loved one need a smartphone or an app?
For phone-based companions, no. The loved one dials a saved number the way they always have, on a landline or any mobile. If a product requires your loved one to learn something new, ask hard questions; new learning is exactly what dementia takes first.
Or see every option a family has, most of them not us, on the honest comparison.