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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: 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.