Echo Dot (4th Gen) Kids + Echo Glow | Panda

**update**
amazon contacted me and i was sent a new echo within a day. Amazing customer service! This one actually works better than the last right out of the gate, because i was able to link it directly to my itunes account (for some reason the other one wouldn’t link) so my son can play his bedtime playlist without me having to bluetooth through my phone.

We loved our echo at first. I got it for my 5 year old, mostly as a way to play music at bedtime to help him fall asleep, but there were so many other features he loved- having it play music and tell him jokes, answering questions. Unfortunately, after a few months of no issues, it started going offline constantly. At first i was able to get back online fairly quickly by pressing the ‘action’ button and going through the steps- annoying, but it worked. Then the action button stopped working almost entirely. Sometimes unplugging it for a few minutes to hours (lately days) and then plugging it back in works…for a little bit. But after a few hours it goes offline again, so my son can’t interact with it, and i’m back to leaving my phone in his room to play music until he falls asleep. I’ve gone through all the trouble shooting steps, our wifi signal is strong, there is nothing interfering and the echo is not far from the router. The problems didn’t start until well after the return window, but we still haven’t even had the thing a full year.

The worst part is that my son is super attached. He refers to it as ‘alexa’ and is sad that she’s not working and horrified at the idea of having to get rid of ‘her.’ i won’t buy another if the same thing will happen, so now i think i just have to leave this useless panda ball on his dresser that makes him kind of sad. Real bummer!

Likes the kid friendly design. We purchased the panda version of the echo dot 4th gen which looks to be well screened onto the plastic and metal parts. When we bought ours it came with a year of amazon kids for free, which is great however the real bennifits of this service seem to start at about 2 or 3yrs of age. Unfortunately most of these features are useless to our “fresh out the oven” newborn; mainly because they’re lazy and haven’t learned to talk yet (joking here).

The sound quality is great! Much better than the other echos in the house already, all of which are 3rd gens or earlier (various models). Integration with the existing smart home devices work in kids mode, however adding things the shopping list for instance is blocked. Regardless it’s moot since this feature is software cloud based and not hardware.

Conclusion: the 4th gen dot is a great sounding device that doesn’t take much of a footprint on a table. That said if you have a wall mount device you’ll be replacing, this version will stick out quite a bit from the holder and could aesthetically look like an echo device hanging on your wall rather than the sleek 3rd or 2nd gen dots.

Awesome buy and super cute! Speaker sounds great. Comes with kids echo dot subscription but i disabled that and use it as a regular echo dot. Easy set up. Highly recommend.

I first got dot, she is the matriarch. She is in the living room and reigns queen. Next i got – dash. He is my tween, in the office. I got tired of moving them around or having to go out to the other room to get info.

Then i decided a new kitty was needed in the bedroom. Alas… Ding! Because if you have more than one, you know you need to name them.

Now, if i could just get rid of all the ‘child’ programming on ding i would be so happy. So love him he is so cute. Although alexa, telling me she had to climb out the window to get me the weather report was a little humorous !

Easy to set up. Got it with the light and easily set up alarms for kiddo to wake to music and softer lights.

I bought for my grandson. Great quality and great price. He loved it.. Very cute

Works great and looks great, being from detroit and looks like the tigers color scheme. Love it!

There is one thing that is annoying and default is turned on, so you have to use the app on the phone and shut it off, but you absolutely can, so i give it a 4 out of 5 for the annoyance of this item.

Love the design, so cute in a kids room. Speaker is so amazing! I wish there were more functions to it, like a nightlight, learning games, and easier bluetooth setup.

I got this for my daughter for her birthday and she just loves it! You can easily access the parental controls that are integrated into the alexa app. She also loves that it’s a panda instead of just a plain speaker.

Love this product! Bought for my 8 year old daughter and she loves it too! It came with the amazon kids subscription for free for a year also. When it expires, i’ll repurchase that as well. So many neat, safe functions for kids!

Update:
we’ve had this echo for a couple months now. I do have to give props to amazon because after i posted my review, someone did give me a call to understand better the issues i was having. There was a recent update to the amazon kids parents dashboard and i am now able to turn off the daily limits which now allows us to listen to stories and turn on white noise at night without have to change the daily limits hours. I also created new kids accounts for their echos and turned those limits off but also kept the accounts on their fire tablet with daily limits. This solved a lot off our issues! I’m still giving it 4 stars because there are some other minor issues but i trust amazon will work to continue to improve.

I bought this during prime day with the glow light. I was hoping to use this as a night light/ noise maker plus an alarm for school. We have the regular echo in our house and the kids love it for music, jokes, and random questions. I thought this would have the added benefit of parental controls. This device fell short on everything.
First, it’s tied to their amazon kids account. Amazon kids+ is great on the fire tablet we have. The app sets a bedtime for the device which is also great to control how early/ late they are on it. Unfortunately, this also reflects on the echo kids and therefore i cannot use use it if bedtime is set to 7pm, for example. I can disable amazon kids +, but then i loose all the parental control and kids content. So i’ve changed the bedtime on the account. But now the tablet is unlocked.
The alexa integration is a 1 star, at best. Every time i ask her to play a skill i get “i’m sorry, i’m having trouble accessing that”. My daughter liked the bedtime story feature but alexa only knows one story.
I’v also tried setting up a waked up alarm with a sunrise light and that’s not integrating well, either.
Im just extremely frustrated with this device and may return the one i bought for my son. If i didn’t get such a deal on it, i would definitely be returning them. Do not pay full price for this. It’s not worth the cost.

Update: amazon customer service contacted me very promptly, offered to put in feedback for the issue with spotify not working with amazon kids enabled, and they helped me reset the device. Setting it up without amazon kids enabled allowed music to play, and showed me where to turn on the explicit filter. Everything else my kid regularly uses still works on the regular version, so i don’t really need kids. Four stars still because if i did need amazon kids this would still be an issue.

I got this specifically because it said it works with spotify. The skill is linked, enabled, and allowed in the amazon kids settings. It took me several resets to get it to acknowledge the skill at all. Now when you say, ‘alexa, play x on spotify,’ the speaker says, ‘ok, here’s x from spotify,’ and then goes immediately back to whatever it was doing. I’ve searched online, followed all the instructions on fixing the behavior. Twice i got it to play music – one time after a few resets, and then one time again after several more resets.

I’m undecided whether to return it because my kid likes asking it random questions that alexa can answer from wikipedia, but currently i have to have the old speaker next to it to play music, so it’s pretty irritating.

Got this for my daughter’s room. She uses it mainly to play music, which it does fine. It does have some issues running some of the games that it’s supposed to do, even though they are definitely enabled in the app. We also have some occasional problems with it following commands.

Overall, i love these. I have several throughout my house. I love that i can ‘drop-in’ on my kid upstairs. My only complaint is it’s integration with spotify. I have my spotify account linked to my amazon account. My kids all have thier own spotify accounts with has parental c0ntrols to limit explicit songs and allow them to create thier own playlist. However, because my account t is the one linked with amazon, all the echos in my house use my spotify account, which is a problem for 2 reasons. The first being that my account doesnt have parental controls, and the second being that my account can only be playing one thing at one place at a time. So if my kid is upstairs usong thier dot to play spotify, then i can’t be downstairs listening to something different. It’s a bit frustrating.

We bought 2 of these, a panda and tiger. These are our 4th and 5th echos, but 1st kids edition. Our others are 3rd gen.
Like others have said, the voice recognition does not seem to be as good on these. We get a lot of ‘i’m having trouble understanding right now’ responses from these, or alexa just doesn’t respond altogether. We also had to disable the kids filter in the toddler room because it wouldn’t allow the sleep sounds application….and they’ve slept with alexa’s brown noise since they were a baby. I couldn’t find a quick way to customize the kids filter to allow this app and i didn’t see a reason why it wouldn’t be allowed so that was a little frustrating.
Overall, since we bought it during prime days and it was on sale i’m ok with the purchase but had we paid pull price i don’t know that i would be as satisfied.

This alexa has been perfect for my 9 year old daughter. We wanted her to be able to listen to audiobooks and music in her room at night, and have an alarm clock to wake to in the morning. This fits the bill! The parental controls are relatively easy to navigate. We are able to set time limits and talk to her via ‘drop in’ or ‘announce’ easily. We have explicit filters on, and we haven’t run into issues with inappropriate music. In my experience, the only time we have had those problems is when alexa can’t understand my younger children and she plays what she ‘thinks’ they said. Overall, this device has been very helpful for our family.

I went for the kids design thinking of my kids. However it’s not practical that it cannot perform some basic tasks. For example, if i ask alexa to add an item to my shopping list, alexa responds that’s something she cannot do. If it’s because of the kids, i would need to say that, at least in my house, the kids have access to the other areas where i have a normal echo dot device where they can add anything if they want. Just a “security feature” that adds no security but just user inconvenience

It still played kids stories with cuss words!

This device is a bit deaf and i have to scream on it.

Funciona, es muy útil, pero tiene un bloqueo de región, consulta si amazon kids esta disponible en tu región