This started as a software project to improve the life of my mother-in-law when all skilled nursing facility residents were confined to their rooms during the COVID lockdown. The project’s goals were to (1) perform simple operations to improve the daily lives of elders and (2) reduce the demands on the nursing staff, freeing them to focus on more important tasks.  Using off-the-shelf hardware, I built a smart speaker that responded to various useful commands (“play big band music on speaker”, “play this week’s sermon on headset”, “what time is it”, and others). It can play through the room speaker or over BlueTooth connected personal head gear. The most important difference between this smart speaker and commercial smart speakers like Alexa, is no data ever leaves the room, thereby insuring personal patient’s privacy and data confidentiality.