Amazon has been offering a kid-friendly variant of
its smallest smart speaker since last year, and now this product is getting an
upgrade of its own. The "all-new" Echo Dot Kids Edition is
essentially a more colorful third-gen Echo Dot including a free one-year
subscription to Amazon's FreeTime Unlimited service and a worry-free 2-year
guarantee.
Available in blue and "rainbow" flavors, the
refreshed Echo Dot Kids Edition no longer comes with a protective case,
sporting the same stylish fabric design as its non-kid-friendly sibling. With
FreeTime Unlimited, children get access to loads of entertaining and
educational content, including more than 1,000 Audible books, thousands of
songs, as well as games and special Alexa "skills."
Meanwhile, parents can set daily time limits for all
these activities, as well as supervise everything their kids have access to and
make the smart speaker automatically filter mature content like explicit songs
from select music services. That doesn't mean Alexa is crippled in any way on
the new Echo Dot Kids Edition, hiding the same amazing tricks up its sleeve as
on the rest of Amazon's hugely successful Echo lineup. We're talking weather
reports, answers to all your questions, timers, alarms, the whole
voice-controlled shebang.
Released with a recommended price point of US$ 69.99,
the latest addition to the Echo family is actually up for grabs right now at
only US$ 49.99. Pre-orders are already underway and deliveries are expected to
start on June 26, at which point this sweet introductory deal should also
expire. Keep in mind that the standard Echo Dot is itself discounted at the
time of this writing, from US$ 49.99 to a measly US$ 29.99.
