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When you hit the “buy” button on that Amazon Cyber Monday deal, it could be a robot that pulls it out of the warehouse. Amazon released a video Sunday that shows its 15,000 Kiva robots at work, and it’s pretty neat to see how the whole system comes together. Amazon fulfills orders out of huge warehouses located all over the U.S. At most of the warehouses, it’s up to the company’s human employees to walk up and down the aisles and grab the items to be boxed up. But 10 of the newest warehouses rely on the Kiva robots to grab entire shelves of goods and ferry them to a human employee. They line up and, one by one, the employee grabs items for packing. Then the robot carries the shelf back to storage. Because the shelves don’t need to be arranged in aisles, Amazon can pack in 50 percent more items than it can in its more traditional warehouses. The squat, round robots look a lot like a Roomba, but are smart enough to avoid obstacles. They travel directly to the shelf they need and slip underneath.

A cylinder then pops out of their top and lifts the shelf into the air. You can watch them in action here:When Willie Kate Friar wakes in the middle of the night, the octogenarian doesn’t have to turn on the lights or crane her neck to find out the time. She simply asks her digital assistant, who responds in a life-like voice. “I’ve found Alexa is like a companion,” Friar said of Amazon Echo’s new voice-controlled assistant, a black cylinder called Alexa. A Panama-based retiree who writes and lectures on cruise boats, Friar is recuperating from a recent fall and asks Alexa to play music during her physical therapy sessions. “The music lifts my spirits,” she said. Widely introduced last summer, Amazon’s new wireless speaker has won praise from tech gurus for its invisible technology that responds to spoken commands and questions. Voice commands can prompt Alexa to do everything from playing music to adding items to an Amazon shopping list to answering questions and giving weather, traffic and news updates.

(Think of the device as a way to connect to the Internet by speaking instead of typing.) The device is also gaining support among disabled adults and the elderly. Among the more than 30,000 customer reviews on the Amazon website are those from caregivers for wheelchair-bound relatives who love the control that Alexa gives them over their environment, and also from family members of older adults who enjoy Alexa’s companionship and help. Alexa wasn’t designed for older adults, and experts say that might be part of its appeal with that demographic. The device avoids the bland aesthetic that has traditionally characterized assistive devices, which turns off consumers who don’t self-identify as old — that is, pretty much everyone. “They were smart to make it look like a cylinder,” said Tony Gentry, an occupational therapist and director of the Assistive Technology for Cognition Laboratory at Virginia Commonwealth University. “People can project their own imagination onto it.”

Gentry recognizes Alexa’s promise to alleviate loneliness in older adults and plans to test the device with some of his elderly clients soon. Robots “don’t have to do much to provide a sense of companionship,” he said, noting how people are quick to anthropomorphize their Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners. Among older adults, a sense of companionship can mean the difference between sickness and health. Research has shown how loneliness causes people to become physically ill. She received her Alexa as a gift during a visit to the U.S. last Christmas. She brought the device back to Panama and connected it to WiFi herself. “People should recognize how easy it is to set up,” she said. To set up Alexa, users need an electrical outlet and a Wifi connection. The latter can come from a desktop computer, smartphone or tablet. Friar owns an Amazon Fire smartphone, along with four computers, two tablets and two Kindle e-readers. She’s unusually connected for her age: only 30% of adults age 71 and over who are online own a smartphone, and of those just a tiny fraction use the phone intensively, according to Forrester Research, a market research firm.

Ron Grant, 63, owns a smartphone, and he’s eager to buy an Alexa, too. “It looks like it’d be fun and handy,” said Grant, of Moore, Okla. who was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease at age 55. For now, he’s holding off buying one, hoping Amazon will lower the device’s $179.99 price tag. Grant enjoys listening to music and would welcome the ease of asking Alexa to play his favorite tunes. He sometimes has hand tremors and would also like a way to turn on the television and adjust the channels and volume without fumbling with the remote control. Alexa can be programed to turn the TV on and off. For those with dementia, Alexa can tell the date and time, as well as respond to questions whose answers might have slipped from memory, such as “When was Ronald Reagan president?” Yet given the devastating progression of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, experts say Alexa’s usefulness can only last so long. The device will eventually become confusing and possibly anxiety-provoking as people forget how to use it.

“The ability to say, ‘what is the traffic like?’ and ‘buy me some paper towels’ is valuable, but it’s a short window,” said Niles Frantz, a spokesman for the Alzheimer’s Association. Another limitation when it comes to older adults is that Alexa cannot currently dial 9-1-1, a capability that online reviewers have requested. With that functionality, the device could replace on-call emergency buttons, which many older adults eschew. A spokeswoman for Amazon confirmed that Alexa cannot currently make calls and declined to say whether that functionality may be added. Alexa does have an Ask My Buddy function to help users in an emergency. Developed by one of the third-party firms that Amazon has invited to create “skills” for Alexa, this function can send phone calls or text messages to up to five contacts. A user would say, “Alexa, ask my buddy Bob to send help” and Bob would get an alert to check in on his friend. For her part, Friar would like Alexa to learn Spanish.