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from the giving-the-kids-a-big-brother dept.
Amazon has unveiled a Kids Edition of its Echo Dot smart speaker:
The $79 Echo Dot Kids Edition takes the original device's design and wraps it in a kid-friendly, colorful case. Otherwise, the hardware is the same as the tiny smart speaker that debuted in 2016. While the regular, $49 Dot is considered a more affordable and accessible version of the regular Echo speaker, the Kids Edition costs more thanks to its bundled software. Amazon includes a two-year warranty plus a one-year subscription to the new Amazon FreeTime Unlimited service, an expanded version of Amazon's new FreeTime for Alexa.
FreeTime gives users "family-focused features" and new parental controls that adults can use to restrict what their kids can do with Alexa. Family features include "Education Q&A," allowing kids to ask Alexa science, math, spelling, and definition questions, "Alexa Speaks 'Kid,'" which gives Alexa kid-appropriate answers to nebulous statements that kids may say such as, "Alexa, I'm bored." Parents can also limit the times during which kids can speak to Alexa (like no talking to it after bedtime), restrict the skills kids can use, filter out songs with explicit lyrics, and more.
[...] But even with the added parental controls, some will be wary of a speaker designed to listen to their children. Like the original Dot, the Kids Edition has a mute button and parents can put the device in "sleep mode" to prevent it from responding to commands. However, the mic will always be listening for its wake-word just like other Echo devices.
In the new Parent Dashboard in the Alexa app and online, parents can monitor how kids are using their Echos (including all their utterances, or the phrases Alexa thinks it heard before trying to respond) and limit their abilities. According to a Buzzfeed report, Amazon claims it isn't making back-end profiles for users with data harvested from Alexa. While the virtual assistant can now recognize voices and provide personalized answers based on who's talking, the company maintains that data is only being used to make Alexa smarter and more tailored to each user.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 25 2018, @05:49PM (8 children)
Protect your children now with family focused parental controls!
Whatever happened to good parenting? How about not being lazy turds and using a keyboard if you need to look something up? How about not allowing corporate spyware into your home and training your kids to implicitly trust it?
We need the Butlerian Jihad!!! I'm sure some database just went into overdrive with that one, stupid illiterate algorithms.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 25 2018, @06:50PM (1 child)
Hmm, what if the databases know exactly what you mean by a Butlerian Jihad?
(Score: 5, Funny) by kazzie on Wednesday April 25 2018, @07:41PM
"Parker, you did delete those databases, didn't you?"
"Yes, M'Lady."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Wednesday April 25 2018, @07:45PM (3 children)
Near as I can tell:
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 25 2018, @08:15PM (2 children)
Aye, it is getting ridiculous when your kids can be taken away from you for playing outside unsupervised. Back in the old country I walked myself to preschool when I was 4. Somehow I survived till now. Could not image the shitstorm if I had my kid walk to the preschool across the street.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Thursday April 26 2018, @07:07AM
Same here... I would "disappear" all the time, going all over the place on my bicycle, visiting friends, or likely just riding around for the hell of it, or occasionally visiting that discarded washing machine in the woods where a lot us kids had stored porn mags we dared not bring home, and relieving myself.
I guess I should consider myself damn fortunate to have grown up in such a place where the biggest predator I was likely to run across was a rattlesnake.
I have a hard time even conceiving the "correct and approved" way to raise a kid these days. In my day, Dad worked a normal eight-hour desk job, Mom was always home ( or shopping... ), and ALWAYS busy. I don't think Mom ever had an hour to herself to just kick back.
Now, today, two-income families ( and sometimes three or four job families ) just to pay rent, and somehow the government expects 100% supervised kids too?
I simply cannot conceive how this can be done.
Granted, one who never got married or had kids is typing this.
I saw other people who got into this, and had nowhere near the resources to pull it off, unless they were dirt-poor and the Government would pay them to stay at home and have kids. And those kids were full of problems from the start. Welfare was the only way of life they knew. They learned how to play the game, just as I learned engineering.
And we both seem to live about the same. I have my computers and circuit boards... they have their bottles of alcohol, cigarettes, weed, and drugs.
I pay tax, and they get entitlements. Each of us continuing to do what we were trained to do.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday April 26 2018, @03:01PM
Time alone, with nature, kept me somewhere close to sane. Being trapped in a house with half a dozen people could drive me homicidally batshit crazy. When the pressure built up, I'd get out, and pass the time alone. After a few hours, I was almost fit to be in human company again.
Maybe that's part of the reason we have so many crazy people shooting up our schools? The kids aren't allowed out to wander the streets, explore the creeks and streams, or to learn what's in the local woods.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday April 25 2018, @09:29PM
Perhaps the opposite could be said. If a parent was diligently performing sysadmin duties, reviewing content policies, firewall logs, schedules, available packages, etc., how are they not parenting all of the sudden?
Parenting doesn't exist in only meat space, but cyberspace as well. This is offering the ability to program a companion robot if you will, while your kids take a journey through cyberspace. Which, in meat space terms, would get your ass thrown in jail for child neglect, since that child could very likely be traversing very bad neighborhoods like 4chan before finally ending up at TimeCube. That's a lazy afternoon for an adult, but parents are being charged with crimes now for the act of walking to school unattended. Based on that fucking twisted logic, a parent should face the death penalty for giving a child Internet access.
If I had a child, you bet your ass I would want to be with them nearly every step of the way on the Internet. Very similar to holding their hands while crossing the street or walking in a parking lot. There would be times in which I would want my child to be able to walk down a neighborhood without me, go out and play in the park, or even in the woods. It's a tragedy that our children today cannot enjoy the innocence and safety that we adults, especially older ones, had in the 60's, 70's and 80s'.
So, yeah, being able to program some AI gatekeeper bot that accompanies them everywhere on the Internet is a good thing. I would even laugh maniacally while I mandated its use on a 16 year old :)
The real issue is not the evolving technology, but the naive and dangerous dependence on Amazon or Google. We know how bad it can be to share that much information, allowing persistent surveillance nearly everywhere you go. However, since this is children, most people aren't all that concerned about their privacy. Parents should be though. If WE control the AI bot, and there is no information leakage to megacorps, then it works for us.
What we need is an AI bot that actually does work for us. We have root control all the way down to whatever TPM might be in place, and no blob or binary in sight. It would seem to me that combining hardware from Purism with Mycroft AI would give us this parenting tool without all the cons that come with the persistent state of being Amazon's bitch.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 25 2018, @09:57PM
Did it ever exist? I know my parents were lazy turds wrt parenting, and they were happy to leave me with the TV and later the computer. What we didn't have then was pervasive, networked and cheap surveillance devices. I think today they would be into parental controls wholesale, because they would feel they have done something "to keep the kid safe" and it wouldn't cause interruptions to what they want to be doing.
I valued that I was able to gain (useful) life experience without my parents there to moderate or prevent it. Kids nowadays... I feel sorry for them and wouldn't want to put a kid in this kind of world myself.