My parents are both in their mid-seventies. My father is a retired engineer with a Windows laptop he uses for email and news. My mother uses a MacBook mostly for video calls with grandchildren and browsing recipes. They are not technophobic — both have smartphones they use with confidence — but their tolerance for complex setup processes, unfamiliar interfaces, and tools that require technical understanding to use is low. Understandably so.
I had tried to set up AI tools for them three times before. ChatGPT required an account creation that confused my father. A voice assistant app my mother tried kept mishearing her accent and she gave up after a week. A simpler AI companion app was rejected because "it felt like talking to a robot."
Skales was different. Here is what happened.
The Setup (Which I Did, Once)
I set it up during a visit. Downloaded the .exe for my father's Windows laptop, ran the installer, connected OpenRouter with a small model, and spent about twenty minutes customising the Desktop Buddy's accessibility settings: larger text, higher contrast notifications, voice output enabled by default, and a simplified home screen that showed only the features they would actually use.
I set up three Custom Skills for each of them. For my father: "Explain this news article in simple terms," "Draft a reply to this email," and "What does this term mean?" For my mother: "Convert this recipe to metric," "Draft a message for the family group," and "What plants grow well in [their city] in [current month]?" These are actual things they asked me about regularly.
The First Two Weeks
My father started with the email drafting. He showed me a message he had received from a government agency about his pension — dense bureaucratic language he found confusing. He had copied it into the Skales chat and asked what it meant. He got a clear, plain-language explanation. "Like having a smart assistant who is always there," he said. He started using it daily.
My mother took longer. The interface initially felt unfamiliar. The turning point was when she asked it to help her write a birthday message for my sister. The first draft was too formal. She told Skales "make it warmer." It revised. "More like how I would say it." It revised again. She approved and sent. After that she used it weekly at minimum.
What They Use It For
Six months in: my father uses Skales to help him understand government correspondence, draft formal emails, look up medical terms after appointments, and get news summaries. My mother uses it to draft family messages, get recipe help, look up plant care, and occasionally just to ask it things she does not want to feel embarrassed asking a family member.
The last point is worth dwelling on. There is a category of question that older adults feel self-conscious asking — about technology, about medical details, about things they feel they should already know. Having a patient, non-judgmental AI available removes that friction entirely.
Neither of them thinks of Skales as "AI." They both refer to it as "my assistant." Read more about Skales for older users or download it free.