Smart home assistants are fun and they aren't just for adults. Kids can have just as much--if not more--fun talking to Alexa and doing all sorts of cool stuff around the house. But what if you don't want your kids to have full rein over Alexa's capabilities? That's where the Echo Dot Kids comes into play--and right now the Echo Dot Kids is down to its best price of 28 for Prime members as an early Prime Day deal. More than half off, this awesome deal is just a foretaste of what you can expect in the upcoming Prime Day sale.

There's another opportunity to pick up Amazon's Echo speakers at their lowest prices to date as part of the company's early Black Friday sales. In many cases, they've dropped back down to the prices we saw during the fall edition of Prime Day. For one thing, the regular Echo is $50, which is half off the usual price. The latest Echo Dot is down from $50 to $25, and the fifth-gen Echo Dot with clock is a third off at $40. The Echo Dot kids' version is down 50 percent to $30 as well.

Amazon has announced that Echo Dot Kids – its smart speaker specifically for children – will be available in the UK next month. Echo Dot Kids, which was first introduced in the US in September last year, is powered by the firm's smart speaker, Alexa, and comes in two fun child-friendly designs – a tiger and a panda. But its release comes amid privacy and security concerns that may make parents think twice before they let the devices in their child's bedroom. Amazon's smart speakers are known to store snippets of conversations users have with Alexa – and the firm has also previously admitted that some of this audio has been listened to and transcribed by staff. To get your children into interacting with AI from an early age, Amazon is providing two options for children's versions of Echo Amazon later gave users the ability to opt-out of sharing their audio recordings with the firm and the option to delete old recordings.

Lawmakers, child development experts, and privacy advocates are expressing concerns about two new Amazon products targeting children, questioning whether they prod kids to be too dependent on technology and potentially jeopardize their privacy. In a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on Friday, two members of the bipartisan Congressional Privacy Caucus raised concerns about Amazon's smart speaker Echo Dot Kids and a companion service called FreeTime Unlimited that lets kids access a children's version of Alexa, Amazon's voice-controlled digital assistant. "While these types of artificial intelligence and voice recognition technology offer potentially new educational and entertainment opportunities, Americans' privacy, particularly children's privacy, must be paramount," wrote Senator Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) and Representative Joe Barton (R-Texas), both cofounders of the privacy caucus. The letter includes a dozen questions, including requests for details about how audio of children's interactions is recorded and saved, parental control over deleting recordings, a list of third parties with access to the data, whether data will be used for marketing purposes, and Amazon's intentions on maintaining a profile on kids who use these products. Echo Dot Kids is the latest in a wave of products from dominant tech players targeting children, including Facebook's communications app Messenger Kids and Google's YouTube Kids, both of which have been criticized by child health experts concerned about privacy and developmental issues.

A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. Echo Dot Kids Edition comes in blue, red and green. Politeness counts, at least when your child asks Alexa a question on an Amazon Echo speaker. Soon, when your youngster asks Alexa to solve a math problem by exhibiting good manners--"Alexa, please tell me what 5 plus 7 is"--the voice inside the Echo will not only supply the right answer, but will then add positive reinforcement: "By the way, thanks for asking so nicely." This new "magic word" feature, as Amazon calls it, starts to roll out via a software upgrade for the Echo, Echo Plus and Echo Dot smart speakers on May 9, as part of a set of free parental controls called FreeTime for Alexa.