Amazon Echo Pop Kids

Amazon’s Echo Pop Kids smart speaker is exactly what it sounds like: a child-friendly version of the $39.99 Echo Pop. That's because it is an Echo Pop, but with a higher $49.99 price, a colorful look with a silicone sleeve, and a six-month subscription to Amazon Kids+. The Kids+ subscription more than justifies the extra $10, and the silicone bumper makes it better suited for accident-prone children than the larger, louder Amazon Echo Dot Kids ($59.99). That earns the Echo Pop our Editors' Choice award for kid-focused smart speakers.

Design: Kid-Friendly Looks and Protection

The Echo Pop Kids doesn’t come in generic animal or space designs like the Echo Dot or the Kindle Kids. Instead, you have a choice between Disney Princesses or Marvel Avengers. The Disney version shows Ariel, Moana, Rapunzel, and Tiana on the front, while the Marvel version has Black Panther, Captain America, the Hulk, and Iron Man on its grille. Each Echo Pop Kids comes with a blue silicone skin that protects it from bumps and drops. 

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Whether it features princesses or superheroes, the colorful grille is simply a removable faceplate held in place by the silicone cover. Taking the plate and skin off reveal that the Echo Pop Kids is just a white Echo Pop at heart. This isn’t a knock on the speaker; part of the point of spending an extra $10 on the Echo Pop Kids is to get a design that will appeal to your child and an extra layer of protection if they knock it over. For additional peace of mind, the speaker comes with a two-year warranty, an upgrade from the 90-day coverage you get with the regular model.

It's worth noting the Echo Dot Kids also comes with a two-year warranty. But these warranties only apply to defects, so they won't help if your child launches the speaker across the room and breaks it. That makes the Echo Pop and its rubber bumper a safer bet.

Same Audio Quality as the Regular Echo Pop

The Echo Pop Kids measures 3.6 by 4 by 3.4 inches (HWD) and is shaped like an egg cut in half. A flat base keeps the speaker upright with the grille tilted slightly upward. A status LED arc resides on the top edge of the speaker, and the top surface houses volume up/down and mic mute buttons, which are surrounded by three far-field pinhole microphones. On the back of the device, near the foot, is a connector for the included power adapter. The silicone sleeve has cut-outs that keep the LED, buttons, microphones, and power port exposed while covering everything else.

Since the Echo Pop Kids is just an Echo Pop with a few extra flourishes, we won’t dive too deeply into its non-children-oriented features or performance. We go into much more detail about how it performs as a smart speaker in our review of the regular Echo Pop, but it's very capable for its size, with nicely balanced sound despite weak bass. It isn’t as loud as the Echo Dot and it lacks the motion and temperature sensors of that speaker, but it supports tap gestures and can double as an Eero Wi-Fi node. And, like all Echo devices, it allows for hands-free use of Amazon's Alexa voice assistant. You can also use Amazon’s Drop In feature to speak directly through the Echo Pop Kids from any Alexa-enabled device in your home, or from your phone.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Content: Amazon Kids+ for Audiobooks and More

The most important aspect of a kid-focused smart speaker is that it provides access to content that’s both appealing and appropriate for children, and the Echo Pop Kids ticks both boxes with its six-month subscription to Amazon Kids+. Normally $4.99 per month or $48 per year, the service offers exclusive content from Disney, Nickelodeon, PBS Kids, and other brands, and it provides a Parent Dashboard for managing and monitoring what your children watch, play, or listen to via Amazon’s various libraries.

One Kids+ subscription works across all compatible Amazon devices, so it unlocks shows on Echo Shows and Fire TVs, books on Kindles, and games on Fire tablets and Android and iOS smartphones, in addition to audio activities like stories on the Echo Pop. Most of Amazon's other kid-focused devices, including the Echo Dot Kids, the Echo Show 5 Kids, the Fire HD Kids tablets, and the Kindle Kids each come with a full year of Amazon Kids+ compared with the Pop's six months, but even that’s a solid $30 worth of the service for just $10 more than the standard Echo Pop.

Exploring content like audiobooks, books, and shows is simple with the Amazon Kids+ app for mobile devices or Amazon's web-based Parent Dashboard. It’s easier to find activities via the app, because the Kids+ web portal is very minimal and clearly designed more for managing what content your kids have access to versus discovering new things you can do. The portal offers a few game suggestions and guides, but there's no real way to sift through the best Kids+ activities you can get. This isn’t a problem for visual content or even audiobooks, because the Amazon Kids+ app lets both you and your kids browse curated content lists. It does, however, make finding good Alexa audio activities difficult.

(Credit: Amazon)

If you want some basic, wholesome audio material for your child, you can just ask Alexa without setting up any skills. The voice assistant will tell stories, provide interesting facts, play lullabies, and offer plenty of functionality on its own. Skills, basically audio apps for Alexa, really open up what it can do, and there doesn’t seem to be a good way to find high-quality ones. For example, the Parent Dashboard shows a “Simon Says Game” at the top of its Alexa skills list. It doesn’t provide any information about it, though, and if you search for “Simon Says” in the Alexa skills store you’ll find 12 different ones, all free with or without Kids+. In fact, there’s no easy way to find out what Alexa skills, if any, are specifically exclusive to Kids+.

This doesn’t mean that Kids+ is useless, even if you only have an Echo Pop. It lets your child listen to hundreds of age-appropriate and informative Audible audiobooks without a separate Audible subscription, and that alone is a huge advantage.

The Best Smart Speaker for Kids

The Amazon Echo Pop Kids is the best kid-friendly smart speaker for less than $50, especially if your child likes Disney princesses or Marvel superheroes. It takes everything that works with the Echo Pop and adds a colorful faceplate, a protective sleeve, and a much longer warranty. It also includes six months of the Amazon Kids+ service for loads of audiobooks, plus plenty of other kid-friendly content like books and videos to enjoy on other compatible devices you have. That's a lot of value for a slightly higher price than the standard Echo Pop, earning it our Editors' Chocie award.