How Amazon refined Alexa to speak to kids

Introduction:

If you have kids, you've probably heard of Alexa. She's Amazon's voice assistant who does everything from turning on the lights to ordering pizza. But what you may not know is that Amazon has refined Alexa specifically to speak to kids. Here's a look at how they did it and what that means for your family.

We say that Alexa speaks kid

In an effort to refine Alexa for a younger demographic, Amazon released the Echo Dot Kids in the UK earlier this year. To mark the occasion, we spoke to Glenn Millard, head of Amazon Kids+ UK, about how Alexa was tailored specifically for kids. According to Millard, ""Alexa has a lot of age-appropriate suggestions at the ready, which we found was really helpful for parents and kids."" For example, under the Family section in the Skills Store, Amazon offers parental controls that allow parents to set educational goals for their children and track their progress.

Amazon Echo Show 10 vs Echo Show 8 vs Echo Show 5: What's the difference?

Josh Sherman, director of Amazon Kids, talked about how the company refined Alexa to be more child-friendly. He said that even from the beginning, they knew that the Echo Show would be placed in areas where families gather - like kitchens and living rooms. To make sure everyone in the family could enjoy it, they included features like jokes and asterisks (*) which would entertain both adults and kids.

Different questions, different answers

One of the biggest challenges for the team was altering how Alexa responds to questions. Kids ask a lot of different questions, with different levels of complexity. "You can't rattle off a very complicated answer to a five-year-old, you have to meet them where they are with the vocabulary they have or the concepts they have," says Purpura. "Kids have this wonderful way of asking such simple questions about the world around them. If you're not careful you'll end up all the way down the rabbit hole and explaining string theory to a five-year-old." In order to avoid this, Amazon had to get creative in the way it phrased some of Alexa's answers.

Thinking about privacy

Anne Toth, director of Alexa Trust, also talked us through some of the privacy implications for having a device that will – probably – be a child's room. "We thought about trust and we thought about privacy, we're thinking about you know you're putting a speaker in your home, and we recognize that people might want to turn it off from time to time," she said. "Echo Dot Kids has a physical mute button and you can also ask Alexa to stop listening of course."

Amazon's UK head of Alexa and devices

Amazon's UK head of Alexa, Toni Reid, has spoken about how the company has refined its voice assistant to be more kid-friendly. "We take privacy very seriously," she says. "We're now building out a platform already having had some very conscious design privacy baked into the product," continues Toth. So now Amazon can offer that to children. The blue light on devices will let kids know when Alexa is listening, and it works just as well for a five-year-old as a 55-year-old. The voice history is the piece of transparency that Amazon offers to customers to let them know that they can see their transcripts.

Conclusion:

Amazon refined Alexa to speak to kids, giving her a child-friendly voice and making different versions of the Echo Show with smaller screens. This way, they can control what information kids are seeing and hearing, as well as keeping their privacy protected. With the smaller screens, it's easier for kids to see and hear Alexa without being overwhelming.