Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Updated Review: Look below for original which was 2 stars. So the morning after posting my review I received a call from amazons research team for the new kids dot. She asked me a lot of questions about what I didn't like and what things could they fix. She said they would be pushing through updates quickly to address the issues that parents gave them in feed back. I don't think that they pushed them this quickly. But here is what happened. I was trying to control my sons dot from the Alexa app which gave me little to no control over his content and I thought this meant these things just were not possible. So Here is what I learned today. The kids dot setting you need to control from parents.amazon.com... Hopefully they will connect this to the app soon! But everyone of my complaints were solved by going into the "free time settings". Here I can add any "skill" I want not just the kids one that are preloaded (again- I can not add skills to the kids dot from the alexa app) So I was able to add skills that he was really excited about that was on our dot plus a few others (like the night light) which address my concern that the pre-loaded skills were too young for him. Also you can control when he is on it and even lock it so he is not playing on it at all times of day. And I was able to open amazon music up to him in the "free time" setting giving him a lot more freedom with his music and still controlling explicit content. Also I found once you set an alarm for the dot, you CAN go into the app go to "reminders and alarms" and add repeat setting and days of the week to that alarm's settings. Which is great since I could not figure out how to do this at first and really made it seem pointless- but again I think amazon can stream line this process allowing alarms to be set from the app and or at settings from the unit. Also today I have the option to set reminders from the app. Like I said I don't think they have changed anything in the last 24 hours but suddenly today I have the option to add reminder when I didn't see it yesterday so I don't know if I changed something in the setting or what. No idea, but I will say this does now work! End of day today, I am actually really happy with this product. But there is a learning curve that amazon is going to have to figure out since there is no how to information out there. So if there is something you can not figure out I encourage you to either reach out to amazon or this Q&A here. And again Amazon because I know you are listening (because I was so impressed with the call I got this morning!)- you need to link the parent dashboard to the app ASAP! Original Review Fairly disappointed in this product and I cant decide if I should just return it now or wait and see if they fix any issues. It seems very much geared toward a young child 3-5 maybe. My son is 7 and it just seems too baby for him. He does not have near the amount of freedom with it that he would want. He cant just say play They Might be Giants and have a music play. He can listen to the IHEART radio but he cant select what he wants to hear played.The "free time skills" available for this version are not functionally thought out- like the night light skill doesn't work on the kids version. Nor does white noise or sleep sounds. I want to be able to select what skills he has not just have a bunch of already enabled games (most of which are geared to very young children. And I cant set a reoccurring alarm like on the regular dots where you can set a repeating alarm for certain days like 6am weekdays would be a great FUNCTION for kids. And I do not have access to his reminders or alarms from the Alexa app like the regular dots have- Wouldn't it be nice to set a reminder for him to do something without having to go up to his room to set it up? What I do like? I like the free time for the access to audio books and these do seem to be level appropriate books at least for a year or two. But is this something he can grow with for a few years. I just don't think so. I think in a year once the novelty of joke telling wears off it will be an expensive alarm clock he forgets to set every night. I want a dot with full content I have parental controls over. Maybe if I didn't have and echo and dot already we wouldn't have been so disappointed in the limitations of this version.