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If you're looking for an alternative to the freedom to leave your kids on an iPad when you need a few precious moments, the Amazon Echo Dot Kids Edition is an attentive and surprisingly attractive companion. Bursting with parental controls and packed with games and "skills," Echo Kids Edition, an Alexa motor machine, entertains children while stimulating their imagination, controlling everyone.
Echo Dot Kids Edition at $ 70 is, for all practical purposes, the same device as the 3rd generation Echo Dot, but it comes with a one-year subscription to FreeTime, an Amazon service with parental controls, thousands Audible books, hundreds of Alexa games and child-friendly skills, and ad-free songs on Amazon Music.
The FreeTime package is worth $ 36 ($ 60 for non-Premium members). Therefore, since the standard Echo Dot costs $ 50 (although it is often sold at much less), buying for Kids Edition can save you money. Nor do you forget that a FreeTime subscription includes thousands of books and videos that you can access on an Amazon Fire tablet, a Kindle, an iOS or Android device. Finally, the Echo Dot Kids Edition comes with a two-year warranty, compared to 90 days for the standard Echo Dot.
Design and configuration
If you already have a third-generation Echo Dot, you will already know what to expect from the Echo Dot children's version, at least as far as hardware is concerned. The standard Echo Dot and children's version come with 1.6-inch wide-band speakers, fabric-covered circumference and a quartet of buttons on the top that let you control volume, turn off the microphone and perform actions such as disabling alarms and configuring Wi-Fi. A thin halo LED indicator lets you know when Alexa is listening, has pending notifications, or has lost her wireless connection.
Indeed, the only real physical difference between standard Echo Dot and children's edition lies in the choice of colors and, surprisingly, the children's edition offers only two choices: the rainbow and the blue . While the 1443243Echo Dot rainbow color is the most eye catching of the two, we chose the blue because it is the favorite color of my daughter (or at least it was the day of our choice).
The initial setup process of the Kids Edition is identical to that of a vanilla Echo Dot: you connect the device to a power outlet, wait until the halo lights up in orange, launch the Alexa mobile application, then use the one to "discover" the point and connect it to your Wi-Fi network. The Echo Dot Kids Edition version was ready to work in minutes.
Setting up FreeTime
Once the Kids Edition is connected to your Wi-Fi network, it's time to set up FreeTime's parental controls. Open the FreeTime parent dashboard in the Alexa mobile app and you will find entries for your kids (which were pre-filled in my case, knowing that Amazon, who knows everything, already knows the name of my seven year old daughter), and typing on an entry allows you to start tinkering with the different parenting settings.
Ben Patterson / IDGWith Amazon's FreeTime service, you can set daily limits for Echo Dot Kids Edition.
From the options available in the parent dashboard, you can set daily times (you can schedule weekdays and weekends separately). I've gone from the front and choose 20 hours and 20 hours as the time limit for my daughter Claire, which means that if she tries to summon Alexa to, say, at 20:05, Alexa will patiently say, "Sorry I can not play for the moment; try again later. Naturally, my daughter tends to harass Alexa for entertaining after bedtime, but after a few unsuccessful attempts, she usually gives up and lowers her head.
The parent dashboard lets you block the ability to control one of your connected smart home devices, as well as enabling an explicit language filter for music. The language filter is supposed to work for all connected music services that support the feature, including Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music and (of course) Amazon Music, while all music services that do not support a filter are blocked.
That's fine, except that my daughter was playing a Soulja Boy shuffle (Soulja Boy being a popular music choice at summer camp this year, with the ubiquitous Lil Nas X), and on one of the tracks, in bulk with a hearty invective of four syllables – oops. My child and I exchanged an amused look (hey, she heard worse) and continued to dance. This is the only time that FreeTime's explicit language filter has slipped incorrect words. So it might be a random and rare problem, but it's worth mentioning.
Ben Patterson / IDGAlexa will only allow your child to send messages to approved contacts using the Echo Dot Kids edition.
The dashboard also allows you to control whether your child can use Alexa's messaging, dropping, and announcing features. For Drop In and Announce features, your child can only listen to or make announcements on other Echo devices in your household, while messaging is limited to the contacts you have specified (Mom and Dad, in Claire's case) . I should note that, as a parent, Drop In is one of the most charming features of the Kids Edition, allowing me to summon my daughter with commands as brief as "Claire, inform me immediately."
Finally, you can pause your child's echo point in the dashboard by pressing a button and choosing the length of the "timeout" from Alexa. This is an essential feature when using Alexa for your child is entering a delirious territory, but I would like this access to be easier; in the current state of things, at least four faucets are required to access them.
Alexa, let's play
Beyond its various parental controls, Amazon's FreeTime service offers thousands of Audible books and many child-friendly premium skills, not to mention Amazon.
Before you get to the games and books, let's talk a little bit more about music because the money donuts, that's what your kids will do with Alexa most of the time: play their favorite songs. Since the summer of 2019, my daughter 's number one concern is "Old Town Road", a song that is etched in my head for all eternity. The Star Wars soundtrack comes second, followed by Bruno Mars's Uptown Funk You Up.
Although my daughter had an undeniable pleasure in using her Echo Dot as a voice-activated jukebox, she was often pissed off when Alexa chose the wrong song or chose a track rather than the original. (It may have been FreeTime's explicit language filter at work.) Most of the time, asking Alexa to play music was a huge success, so much so that I used the "pause" function on a regular basis. from FreeTime to give Claire's mother and myself a break.
Then there are hundreds of Alexa-focused kids skills, ranging from an outright version of hide-and-seek to impressive "Choose Your Own Adventure" type reading games and products. by Audible.
Even though basic, the Hide and Seek skill proved to be a popular choice, mainly because it was so easy to win. The game begins when Alexa asks your child to choose a hiding place. Once your toddler is hiding, Alexa begins to guess where your child is. If she can not guess correctly after three attempts, she gives up. Alexa does not use any sensors or machine learning technology when Alexa plays hide-and-seek; Instead, Alexa's strategy is based on crazy assumptions, such as "Are you behind the dollhouse?" (No, because Claire does not have a dollhouse.) Of course, the version of Alexa's hide and seek is a little dull, but for me. girl, win never gets old.
Master Swords is another proven game: you fight pirates by spelling blades. When confronting a villain, you must correctly spell a word (such as "right" or "forest") to make your shots fall. if you are wrong, you miss. It's hard, fun, well played and full of sound effects, even though Claire sometimes got frustrated ("That's weird!") When the game cut her off before she could finish spelling a word.
Ben Patterson / IDGMy daughter had a crush on Alexa's myriad of games and skills, but playing music in the Echo Dot Kids Edition was by far her favorite pastime.
We also enjoyed classic books Choose your own adventure on Audible (such as Space and beyond), which involves listening to a story and making decisions about what to do at the key moments of the action. As in the case of Master Swords, the Choose Your Own Adventure books we listened to were produced brilliantly, with seasoned vocalists and evocative sound effects. Even so, the frustration began to show up when Alexa sometimes misunderstood Claire's instructions and (for example) pulled our character out of an airlock rather than choosing to stay within the confines of the spaceship.
Best of all was Star Wars: Choose your destiny, another adventure choice game that my Star wars– Obsessed Tyke found fascinating. In the particular story that we tried (you can choose between great adventures and "mini" adventures, from elsewhere), Han Solo and Chewbacca had to launch an imperial blockade because they were , uh … OK, does it matter? Whatever the case may be, Claire was clearly engaged, asking Chewie to repair the hyperdrive and ordering Han to go to the shelter rather than blindly charging her blaster. Once again, acting enthusiastically with authentic Star wars The music and the sound effects have had important repercussions to maintain Claire's interest.
Of course, we only touch the surface of Alexa's varied skills aimed at children. Indeed, if your kids are looking for a new activity, they can always just say "Alexa, let's play", and Alexa will choose a game to try; In fact, that's how we found Master Swords.
Bottom line
My daughter said she is the guardian of the Amazon Echo Dot Edition, and I tend to accept it. Entertaining without becoming disturbing, educational without getting lost in a boring territory, the Echo Dot Kids Edition managed to keep my second easily distracted engaged, but rarely let it slip into a frenzy, while allowing me to control when and how she could play with her new digital friend.
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