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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday April 25 2018, @05:39PM   Printer-friendly
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.

Also at CNN and Fortune.


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  • (Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday April 25 2018, @09:29PM

    by edIII (791) on Wednesday April 25 2018, @09:29PM (#671875)

    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.

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