KindPhone and KindredMind compared

Last reviewed August 2026

If you have been looking for something to answer the phone when your mum or dad rings and you cannot pick up, you will probably have found both of us. We are asked about KindredMind often enough that it seemed better to write it down properly than to leave people guessing.

KindredMind looks like a thoughtful service built by someone in the same position as us. It was started by a Canadian carer whose own mother has dementia. It is a funded start-up with a team behind it. We have taken care below to describe it accurately, and where it is better than KindPhone we say so. If it turns out to suit you better, that is a good outcome. You are trying to look after someone, not pick a team.

One practical thing to check before you go any further: their pricing page says the service is "available across Canada and the United States" and that all billing is processed in Canadian dollars, while their FAQ says KindredMind "is available to families worldwide" and works with any phone number. We can't tell from the outside which applies to a family in Britain, so if you are interested in them, ask them directly about UK numbers and billing in pounds.

The short version

Both services answer the phone on behalf of a family carer and hold a conversation with an elderly, sometimes confused caller. Two things differ, and they matter more than any feature list.

Which number she rings. KindredMind gives the person you care for a new dedicated number, or a memory button on the landline. KindPhone answers the number she already rings, yours, by picking up the calls you miss. Nothing about her phone changes.

Whose voice answers. KindredMind is built around recording your voice and using a synthesised version of it, so that she hears you. You can pick a stock voice instead, but the cloned voice is the default and the heart of the product. KindPhone never uses a family member's voice. It answers as itself, and if she asks who she is talking to, it tells her.

Side by side

Taken from kindredmind.care in August 2026. If we have any of it wrong, tell us and we will correct it.

Where KindredMind is better

We would rather say this ourselves than have you find it out later.

• It rings out as well as answering. Check-in calls and medication reminders are useful, and we do not have them.
• It handles families who share the care. Their Care Circle idea fits how most families actually divide things between siblings.
• It is careful about who it is for. Their site says outright that it is not the right tool once someone can no longer use a phone independently. That is a hard thing to put on your own sales page, and we respect it.

Why we do not use your voice

This is the real difference between us.

The case for a cloned voice makes sense, and it isn't silly. A familiar voice is comforting, and there is an approach called simulated presence therapy built on exactly that idea. KindredMind points to it, along with validation therapy and a trial from 2024. Those references are real. We went and read them.

We know the appeal first-hand, because we built it. Early on, Edward made a synthesised copy of his own voice and tried it on his own mum. It frightened her. It sounded close enough to be him, and wrong in a way she couldn't put her finger on. It didn't comfort her. It unsettled her. People call that the uncanny valley. She couldn't work out that it was a recording, so the feeling had nowhere to go. She was left with a version of her son that wasn't quite her son. We stopped, and we haven't gone back to it.

That is one family and one try, and a better copy of a voice might not do that. But it sent us to look at the evidence properly, instead of trusting how good the idea sounded.

The evidence turns out to be weaker than it looks. The Cochrane review of simulated presence therapy found three trials, judged them low quality, and couldn't say either way. In some of those trials the comparison was a recording of a different person's voice, and the family member's voice did no better. The 2024 trial is real but small: eighty five people, all in one place, and all of them in a care setting rather than living at home. What was played to them was a recording the family had made, not a live conversation with a synthetic voice. Validation therapy has its own Cochrane review, which found no clear difference. We have set all of this out, with the papers, on our evidence page.

Then there is the question the evidence cannot answer. The UK's own inquiry into truth and lying in dementia care, run by the Mental Health Foundation with a panel that included people living with dementia and family carers, accepted that kind untruths have their place, but drew a line at building make-believe worlds. It gave the example of a bus stop where no bus will ever come. The Alzheimer's Society puts it more sharply still: an outright lie should be treated "a bit like antipsychotic drugs", used only under very select conditions and with extreme care.

We think a conversation in a synthesised copy of your daughter's voice is the same kind of thing as that bus stop. It may well comfort someone in the moment. We are not certain it is wrong, and we are not going to tell families who choose it that they have done something bad. But when the evidence cannot show that your voice beats any voice, and the UK guidance says not to build make-believe worlds, the careful thing is not to do it. So we do not.

What we do instead is put the warmth somewhere else: in patience, in never correcting her, in answering the same question for the twentieth time as though it were the first, and in knowing the real details of her week so that what she is told is true.

Why the phone number matters so much

The other difference sounds like a technicality. It isn't.

Dialling your number is one of the most practised things your mum has ever done. It can outlast a great deal: the names of grandchildren, what she had for lunch, whether she has already rung you twice this morning. Edward's mum could not always place who he was for certain, and she still knew his number.

That is why KindPhone works the way it does. She rings the number she has always rung. Your phone rings first, exactly as it does now, and if you cannot get to it KindPhone picks up instead of voicemail. There is nothing new for her to learn, nothing to remember, no card by the phone, no button to press correctly.

A new number is a small thing to ask of most people. It is not a small thing to ask of someone whose memory is going. And you are asking it at the worst moment, when she is upset and wants you.

Which one should you choose?

KindredMind is likely the better fit if scheduled reminders and check-in calls are the thing you actually need, if several of you share the caring, or if you have thought about the voice question and decided that hearing you is what would settle your mum.

KindPhone is likely the better fit if you want her to carry on ringing the number she already knows, if you would rather no one pretended to be family, if you want your data handled in the UK under UK law, if you have a landline and would like real control over when it rings, or if you are happy to use something early and help shape it.

And if neither is right, remember what the best study in this field actually found. Seven hundred and eighty families, and what helped was a trained person ringing them regularly. If you can get that, from an Admiral Nurse or the Alzheimer's Society support line, take it. It is better than anything we do. We would rather say so than sell you something.

We have tried to be fair here. If anyone at KindredMind thinks we have described their service inaccurately or unkindly, get in touch and we will put it right.