OCTOBER 2019 PCWorld 61Amazon service that boasts parental controls,
thousands of Audible books, hundreds of
Alexa games and kid-friendly skills, and
ad-free tunes on Amazon Music.
The FreeTime bundle is a $36 value ($60
for non-Prime members), so given that the
standard Echo Dot costs $50 (although it’s
frequently on sale for much less), ponying up
for the Kids Edition can save you some cash.
Also, keep in mind that a FreeTime
subscription includes thousands of books and
videos that you can access on an Amazon Fire
tablet, a Kindle, or an iOS or Android device.
Finally, the Echo Dot Kids Edition comes with
a two-year warranty, versus just 90 days for the
standard Echo Dot.
DESIGN AND SETUP
If you already have a 3rd-generation Echo
Dot, you’ll already know what to expect from
the Echo Dot Kids Edition, at least on the
hardware side of things. Basically a 1.7-inch-
thick hockey puck of a speaker, both the
standard Echo Dot and the kids version
come with 1.6-inch full-range speakers, a
fabric-covered circumference, and a quartet
of buttons on top that let you control the
volume, turn off the microphone, and
perform actions such as silencing alarms and
setting up Wi-Fi. A thin, halo-shaped LED
indicator lets you know when Alexa is
listening, has waiting notifications, or has
lost its wireless connection.
Indeed, the only real physical difference
between the standard Echo Dot and the Kids
Edition is the color selection, and surprisingly,
the Kids Edition offers only two choices:
rainbow and blue. While the rainbow-colored
Echo Dot is the more eye-catching of the two,
we chose blue because that’s my daughter’s
favorite color (or at least it was on the day we
picked it).
The initial setup process for the Kids
Edition is the same as for a vanilla Echo Dot:
you plug the device into a power outlet, wait
for the halo to glow orange, fire up the Alexa
mobile app, and then use the app to
“discover” the Dot and connect it to your
Wi-Fi network. I had the Echo Dot Kids Edition
up and running within a couple of minutes.SETTING UP FREETIME
Once you have the Kids Edition connected to
your Wi-Fi network, it’s time to configure
FreeTime’s parental controls. Open the
FreeTime Parent Dashboard in the Alexa
mobile app and you’ll find entries for your
kids (which was pre-populated in my case,
given that the all-knowing Amazon already
knows the name of my seven-year-old
daughter), and tapping an entry lets you start
tinkering with the various parental settings.
Among the available options in the Parent
Dashboard is the ability to set daily time limits
(you can program weekdays and weekends
separately). I went ahead and choose 8 a.m.
and 8 p.m. as the time limits for my daughter
Claire, which means if she tries to summon