This may seem obvious given my profession, but I think technology is…fine? Even for kids? It’s hard to believe that it’s safe for your kid to get anywhere near a Wi-Fi-enabled device when you read stories about tech addiction, hacked toys and horrible YouTube videos. It’s also possible that my opinion might change as my kids get older.
But I do believe it is possible for families to strike a balance between protecting their children and introducing them to the tools that they will be using for the rest of their lives. As a millennial, I’ve been on the Internet for as long as I can remember, but I’ve somehow grown to adulthood without marrying a talking toaster. I’m guessing that your kids will probably be okay.
For that reason, I was open to the idea of testing Amazon’s Echo Dot Kids Edition. For months, I’ve found the child-friendly Fire tablet and FreeTime Unlimited to be useful tools for helping us navigate dinners and long plane rides with an obstreperous toddler and wiggly baby. And I was mildly, perversely curious to see what a smart assistant aimed at a child would do.
The good news is that your kid is probably smarter than you think. The bad news is that your kid does not need a smart device.
Dots for Days
Like the Fire for Kids, the Echo Dot Kids Edition is just an Echo Dot, but foam-wrapped in appealing colors for maximum cuteness. The Dot was already cute, but the foam makes it even cuter. When I took it out of the box, my three-year-old was enthralled and asked to carry it around with her.
While a Dot is $50, the Kids Edition is $80. That extra $30 pays for that kid-friendly foam case, a two-year unlimited warranty, and a year’s subscription to FreeTime Unlimited. FreeTime Unlimited is Amazon’s subscription service, which gives your kid access to age-appropriate content in the form of apps, games, videos, books, and now, on the Dot for kids, Alexa skills.
My colleague Robbie Gonzalez outlined a few of my concerns before I even received the tester. I didn’t want to give my toddler unlimited access to her own personal digital slave, so I restricted her use to a half-hour, just as I do with the tablet or the television. She also had to play with me. I unplugged the Echo Dot and put it in a drawer whenever it wasn’t in use. Whatever worries I have about privacy for my own sake, I triple, double, and quadruple for my kids.
Setup is simple. I plugged it in and downloaded the Alexa app while my toddler waited impatiently. Then we sat there for awhile as I pondered what to do with the darn thing.
Trying to figure out how to play with the Dot with a three-year-old felt a little like sitting at a computer in 1995, trying to figure out something to ask Jeeves. Many adults find the Echo and Echo Dot to be useful tools, but toddlers don’t have chores. They don’t even have to wipe their own butts. My toddler doesn’t need to know what the weather will be like, or what temperature a steak is supposed to be.
I asked Alexa for ideas. When she suggested a joke, I asked her for one. “What’s the difference between a well-dressed cyclist and a scruffy guy on a tricycle? Attire!” she said. I looked at my toddler, who had a polite, frozen smile on her face.
As with the Fire for Kids, you can access FreeTime Unlimited’s controls online via the Amazon Parent Dashboard at parents.amazon.com. You can set an age filter, time limits, or give your child access to the devices in your smart home so that they can turn the lights on and off. I checked, and the age filter for my toddler is set from two to six. I’m not sure even a six-year-old would have gotten that joke (did you?).
Play Date
Over the course of a few weeks, we did find ways to have fun with the Dot. My toddler’s diction still isn’t very clear. Even I still have trouble interpreting phrases like “swammy” (“salami”). But Alexa was able to decipher her perfectly, leading to my worst nightmare coming true: for the first few days, all she did was ask Alexa to play “Let It Go” over and over and over.
The games were hit or miss. But we did like Freeze Dancers, a self-explanatory game wherein we had to freeze whenever Alexa stopped playing music. My toddler also enjoyed queueing up KidzBop playlists whenever she liked, within her half-hour of playtime.
It’s easy to remember what we did every day, because the app keeps a complete history of my toddler’s activities that you can remove or delete as you see fit. For example, I see that there is a long string of commands telling Alexa that she is a butt. Alexa refused to respond.
Some of her responses are perfectly tailored to a three-year-old. When my toddler asked her if she had a dog, Alexa responded, “I don’t have a dog, but if I did, I would name him Astro!” I can also see that my toddler asked for help making cookies, and Alexa told her to ask a grown up first before touching the oven, toaster, or microwave.
But other responses were wildly off-base. My toddler is obsessed with stars and Greek mythology (yes, I know! She’s only three! She’s amazing!) and when she asked Alexa who Cassiopeia was, Alexa responded that cassiopea is a genus of jellyfish. That is…not the answer we were looking for at all.
When I asked Alexa what a vampire squid was, she said that it’s a small cephalopod. What’s a cephalopod? I kept asking follow-up questions until it just became easier to Google pictures of vampire squid myself. Reciting rote facts isn’t helpful for a three-year-old who has no context for such things. Arguably, it isn’t helpful for anyone.
I also was sent a set of Lego Duplos, in order to try the Lego Duplo Stories Alexa skill. But by the time I had futzed around and figured out that it was only available in my adult profile, and not in FreeTime, my toddler had become distracted by building planes, tying Lego people onto them with some twine she had found, and flying them to see her grandparents. The firefighters were taking care of the girl’s dogs, and her grandparents were waiting at the airport.
My toddler didn’t need Alexa’s help making up stories. It seemed counterproductive to interrupt her with pre-recorded stories about other peoples’ dogs. Maybe she knew, better than Lego would, which stories would help her process the events that were happening in her own life.
On that note: As with the Fire for Kids, toggling between the FreeTime profile and the adult profile can be difficult. Parental controls mean that your child can’t use voice purchasing, or ask Alexa to say bad words. But you have to whitelist other skills from the parent dashboard into FreeTime on the Dot.
I couldn’t figure out how to do this, even after getting on the phone with Amazon customer service. The Alexa app said the skill was enabled under my toddler’s profile, but when I tried to play it, it repeatedly told me I could not. Since I was sitting with my toddler anyway, I just switched to my parent profile, but obviously, this isn’t a solution that would work if your kid plays with the Dot unattended.
People Pleaser
If you’re a parent, you might be worried that your kid will not be able to distinguish Alexa from a person. I can’t answer for everyone’s kid. But in my own experience, my toddler was able to quickly and easily divine what Alexa was all about.
For her parents, Alexa might be a useful hands-free tool. But, at least in its current incarnation, it’s pretty obvious to a toddler that Alexa is a simulacrum of human interaction that’s designed to distract her long enough for me to cook dinner.
I could see this revelation dawning early on. After the first day of testing, my toddler asked me, “Is Alexa my friend?” I explained that no, Alexa is a machine, not a person. The next day, she asked, “Can Alexa make me feel better when I’m sad?” No, I responded again. Your teachers, friends, and family can make you feel better when you’re sad.
From then on, her interest declined sharply. One afternoon, she was too busy taping all our kitchen chairs together to talk to Alexa. Another time, I convinced her to start playing Name The Animal. She was engaged for the first few minutes. But after a frustrating interval where she yelled “MONKEY! MONKEY!” and Alexa responded, “The correct answer is ‘Chimpanzee'”, she flopped down on the couch in a convincing imitation of the teenager she will someday become and sighed, “You play it.”
Our kids don’t need adults in their lives simply to play games and read stories. We interpret context for them: When you ask what a vampire squid is, do you want the dictionary definition? Or do you want to look at pictures of squids? Do you want to talk about how they swim or where they live, or whether they have names?
We adults also provide behavioral guidance and emotional support. If you don’t specifically tell your child that Alexa is not a person, it’s possible that they might turn to Alexa to fulfill their emotional needs. But my toddler is three, and only needed me to explain that Alexa was a machine twice. After that, it was as unthinkable for her to say, “Alexa, I’m bored”, as it would have been for her to beg our dishwasher for a hug.
Given the choices we’ve made as a family, we simply didn’t find the Dot useful as a tool or toy. I didn’t want my daughter to have unlimited access to the Dot, so a few of the functions were useless. If my toddler wants to turn on the lights, she can pull a step stool over and turn it on manually, as short humans have been doing since indoor electricity was developed. We don’t have Echoes in every room, so I couldn’t use it to tell her to come in for dinner. And like most parents, we find that our children wake up obscenely early, so it was useless as an alarm clock.
It may be different for other families, especially if you have older children. But for my toddler, it came down to a simple question: Why talk to a machine or ask it to read to you when your mom is right there? Like Alexa, I can play music and games, but I can also serve snacks, engage in long philosophical discussions about whether your right leg is your right leg or your left leg, and walk to the sink and run water over my head when she’s hilariously spat jelly all over my face. It will be a long time before Alexa can compete with any of that.