How Introducing My Mom to AI Changed Our Conversations
My mom used to treat me like Google.
Every time we talked, the first few minutes of the conversation were basically a laundry list of questions she had saved up for seeing me. It ranged from the TV setup not working, to needing advice on a purchase or even helping explain something happening in politics. Honestly… I didn’t always know the answer. Like most people when they get asked a random question, I’d throw out a few guesses, suggest a couple things to try, and eventually land somewhere around, “You might want to research that a little more.”
Five years ago the obvious answer would have been, “Just Google it.” But not only is that rude, but anyone who has ever watched a non-technical person open a Google search page knows exactly how that goes. They stare at ten blue links and have absolutely no idea which one is actually going to help them. The barrier isn’t intelligence, it’s friction. You have to interpret search results, pick the right source, read through instructions, and figure out what actually applies to your situation.
Then a year ago I realized something. AI might be the single most useful tool I could introduce to my mom. Thats not because she’s particularly tech savvy…. in fact, it’s kind of the opposite. She lives independently and is perfectly capable of figuring things out, but traditional tech tools were always a little clunky for her.
So I started doing something different.
Whenever she asked me one of those questions, instead of answering it myself, I would pull out my phone, open ChatGPT voice mode, and ask the exact same question outloud in front of her. It doesn’t hurt that I set the voice to sound like a sexy Australian man and it makes the whole thing feel slightly ridiculous in the best possible way.
The first thing my mom noticed was how natural the responses sounded. It didn’t feel robotic or scripted. It sounded like someone actually explaining something. The second thing she noticed was that the conversation didn’t stop after one answer. I kept asking follow-up questions.
“What if it’s doing this instead?”
“What would cause that?”
“Is there an easy way to check that?”
And ChatGPT would just keep responding. After we did this a few times, something interesting happened….one day ChatGPT answered my question, and before I could say anything else, my mom jumped into the conversation and asked a follow-up question herself.
ChatGPT answered her.
She paused for a second as if realizing, “Wait… it can understand me too?” That was the moment the whole thing clicked for her. She realized this wasn’t some complicated tool where you had to know the right commands or type the perfect prompt. You could literally just talk to it.
And once that clicked, everything changed.
Before that, I had tried to show her ChatGPT on her laptop. She’d used it a couple of times to help rewrite an email or maybe look at a contract, but it never really stuck. It felt like just another website.
But when she experienced it as a voice assistant, something shifted. It stopped feeling like a research tool and started feeling like someone she could just ask questions. Now she uses it almost every day in a variety of formats. She has her own personal assistant who can explain anything. The biggest change isn’t just that she asks AI questions instead of me. The biggest change is how our conversations start.
Before, when we talked, she would open with a list of things she needed help figuring out. Now the first thing she says is usually something like, “Look what I learned how to do this week.” She’ll tell me about something she researched, or something ChatGPT helped her figure out.
AI didn’t replace our conversations but it made them better. Seeing her feel more confident using technology might be one of the most unexpectedly cool things I’ve seen AI do so far.
