Amazon’s newest kid-friendly Echo is basically a talking nightlight

Amazon has faced questions about whether or not its kid-friendly Alexa devices violate children’s privacy, but that hasn’t stopped it from making another one.

During its annual hardware event on Wednesday, the Jeff Bezos e-commerce empire announced the Amazon Echo Glow. As its name suggests, it’s an Amazon Echo … that glows. It’s $29.99 and customers in the United States can preorder it now.

As you might expect, the little luminescent orb is Alexa-enabled, so kids who have one can give it a variety of voice commands intended to be both fun and helpful. According to Amazon, you can request a sleep timer that will dim the light when it becomes time to go to bed or make it glow like a campfire. 

It’ll eventually have a “dance party” mode with music, too.

This isn’t the first kid-focused Echo device. Amazon launched the Echo Dot Kids Edition in 2018, which eventually led to criticism from advocacy groups. Those groups accused Amazon of storing private information provided by children, which parents had a hard time getting rid of.

Amazon would later deny that the Echo Dot Kids Edition was doing anything unseemly with private data.