Amazon’s Echo devices will now allow kids to have interactive conversations with an AI-powered Alexa via a latest feature called “Explore with Alexa.” First announced in September, the addition to the Amazon Kids+ content subscription allows children to have kid-friendly conversations with Alexa, powered by generative AI, but in a protected fashion designed to make sure the experience stays protected and appropriate.

Though there are already some AI experiences that cater to younger users, just like the AI chatbots from Character.ai and other firms, including Meta, Amazon is among the many first to specifically look to generative AI to develop a conversational experience for youths under the age of 13.

That also comes with constraints, nevertheless, as generative AI will be led astray or “hallucinate” answers, while kids could ask inappropriate questions. To deal with these potential problems, Amazon has put guardrails into place around its use of gen AI for youths.

For starters, the Alexa Kids science team narrowed down the brand new experience, which leverages Alexa’s LLM (large language model) technology, to incorporate only kid-friendly fun facts and trivia questions. Initially, the content will come from just two partners, the World Wildlife Fund and A-Z animals. In time, the team would love to expand the AI to incorporate other areas of interest to kids, like space, music, video games, and sports.

As well as, and maybe most significantly, the generative AI experience shouldn’t be happening in real-time on the device.

“We would like to go slow and be intentional and be measured with how we’re introducing this latest tech, in addition to any latest tech for youths, which is why we’re not only hooking the experience as much as an LLM at runtime and form of letting kids go at it,” explains Arjun Venkataswamy, Senior Product Manager for Alexa Kids, in an interview with TechCrunch. “The best way that we’ve integrated an LLM here is we use it to generate content at scale offline, after which undergo a review process that features each humans, in addition to AI, after which take that reviewed content after which put it into our experience,” he says.

In other words, kids aren’t using generative AI on the fly when conversing with Alexa, and the content is pre-reviewed and comes from a small dataset of just animal facts and sources.

Nonetheless, since the AI can generate tens of hundreds of potential responses, not every answer will be reviewed by a human before being added to the experience. To that end, Amazon can also be using AI to assist it review the materials it’s using for “Explore with Alexa.”

“What our AI is doing is taking trusted content after which determining what’s fun, what’s fun, turning them right into a trivia query — so it’s doing useful things for us at scale that we wouldn’t have been capable of do without this tooling…but we feel really good concerning the safety guardrails which might be in place right away when it comes to content,” says Venkataswamy.

To access the brand new experience, kids can trigger the AI-generated facts or trivia in considered one of two ways. They’ll either utter a specific phrase that kicks off “Explore with Alexa,” like “Alexa, let’s explore animals” or “Alexa, tell me an animal fact.” However the more interesting technique to use this feature is to have kids engage in organic conversations with Alexa where this topic could come up. As an illustration, a child might ask “What does a lion’s roar sound like?” or “How briskly can a cheetah run?” This might also allow kids to enter the more conversational Q&A experience.

Plus, over the following few months, Alexa can even prompt kids on some occasions, asking in the event that they need to hear something interesting about animals.

Unlike more traditional conversations with Alexa, the AI experience works two ways. That’s, it’s not only kids asking Alexa a matter and receiving a response.

“One among the things we predict is actually cool about this paradigm is kids aren’t just asking Alexa questions and getting the answers — Alexa is now asking kids questions,” says Venkataswamy. That’s, Alexa could ask the youngsters a trivia query like “What’s the fastest animal on Earth?”

As any teacher will inform you, by having the youngsters try to think about the reply first, the reply will stick of their minds higher once they hear the response.

“Without delay it’s, it’s narrow. Alexa is asking kids trivia questions,” Venkataswamy continues. “But we would like to proceed expanding on that and making it more interactive.”

Eventually, Amazon desires to have this generative AI experience integrated at runtime for each kids and adults, however it knows it must proceed fastidiously, especially with the previous.

“We do need to integrate an LLM in runtime in a more protected way than we might integrate it for adults…Nonetheless, this approach lets us iterate and determine the best ways to get each protected and pleasant content outputted from the LLM for youths,” says Venkataswamy.

Amazon can also be preparing to launch an AI-powered “Let’s Chat” Alexa experience for adults later this yr, he says, based on the identical LLM stack.

When it comes to privacy, the corporate notes it’s not training its LLM on kids’ answers. As well as, the “Explore with Alexa” experience and any future LLM-backed features will proceed to follow the identical data handling policies of “classic Alexa” (non-AI Alexa). Which means the Alexa app will include a listing of the questions asked by kids within the household (those with a kids’ profile) and the response Alexa provided. That history will be stored or deleted either manually or robotically, depending in your settings.

Alongside the launch of “Explore with Alexa,” the brand new Echo Pop Kids speakers can even now be available for purchase, starting at $49.99 within the U.S.

The Echo Pop Kids will are available in two latest designs: Marvel’s Avengers and Disney Princess, which feature corresponding character themes. Kids can use the devices to listen to a greeting, fun fact, or joke about an Avenger or Disney Princess, in step with the theme. Each also include six months of access to the Amazon Kids+ subscription service, which, along with “Explore with Alexa,” also offers a spread of kid-friendly games, apps, books, videos, and more, including custom Alexa themes.

Nonetheless, you don’t need a particular “Kids” device to make use of “Explore with Alexa.” The feature works on any device set to kids mode or any communal family device, if parents have arrange their kids’ voice ID.

Initially, “Explore with Alexa” will likely be available in English only but internationalization is further down the road.

It’s harder for Amazon to estimate when such an AI feature will grow to be available at runtime for youths, though.

“I can’t offer you a timeline, because we don’t have a concrete answer for what exactly we’re going to be doing yet, although we do have plans and experiments we’re planning to look into,” Venkataswamy says. “I’ll say that when it comes to our criteria for after we’re going to get there, we’re working closely with the Family Trust team at Amazon that’s connected to quite a lot of research institutions in the united stateswe need to have the opportunity to get some confidence from external partners that our approach is correct,” he adds.