Alexa’s latest features help kids improve their reading skills

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Amazon’s virtual voice assistant, Alexa, is already a great help in finding answers to all our questions, but it’s also useful for kids and students in the educational curriculum. So, to help kids improve their reading skills, Amazon recently announced a new edutainment service called Reading Sidekick for Alexa-enabled devices.

Alexa Leading Sidekick

Amazon Reading Sidekick, as the name implies, turns Alexa into a virtual reading companion for your kids. It reads with your child, helps them when they are struggling with words, and helps them develop their reading skills.

The Automatic Reading Assistant will be available from June 29th and will be available as part of Amazon’s KidsPlus service. Works with most Alexa compatible devices such as Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Dot Kids, Echo Plus, and Echo Show. If the smart speaker or display is in kid mode (enabled with the Alexa app on your smartphone), your child can call it with voice commands.So if the device is in kids mode, the kid can easily say “Alexa, let’s read” Start reading the sidekick.

Alexa Leading Sidekick Function

When launched, this feature allows kids to choose the physical version of the book on their Fire tablet or the digital version in the Kids Plus app on other devices. There are three read modes to choose from – Read a lot mode, read a little mode, and change the order..

Reading mode

In the “read a lot” mode of the sidekick reading feature, you can see that the child is reading most of the selected books. In this mode, the child needs to read four consecutive pages of the book, and the fifth page is read by Alexa.

On the other hand, the “read a little” mode allows the child to follow while Alexa is reading most of the book. The “take a turn” mode is a combination of the above two modes that both Alexa and your child can read alternately.

So, after choosing priority mode, Alexa will start listening to your children’s readings, improve their reading skills, correct pronunciation mistakes, and encourage them even after a successful reading session. Encourage with phrases such as “Thank you for your hard work!” To evoke those senses of success. However, one of the main drawbacks of the Reading Sidekick feature is that no quizzes or Q & A are provided after the reading session. So there is no way to understand how much a child understood while reading a book.

availability

When available, the Reading Sidekick feature is part of Amazon’s Kids Plus service that comes with Kids edition Fire tablets and Echo speakers. You can also get it as a subscription service for $ 2.99 per month (~ Rs .220) or $ 69 per year (~ Rs .5140). However, if you do not have an Amazon Prime subscription, the price will be $ 4.99 per month (~ Rs .370) and $ 99 per year (~ Rs .7375).