There could be a great reason to buy your family an Amazon Echo Show 5 Kids this season. And it all comes down to stupidity.
For decades, it was a time-honored tradition of off-road riding only with Crazy Libby (opens in a new tab) keep the family happy and healthy. Before digitization, we had notebooks full of stupid plot frames. In fact, they were just skeletons, and the note taker called prompts from the page, asking for a person, place, thing, animal, feeling, etc. The goal was to generate the most ridiculous story possible, which the designated transcriber then read to the family’s hysterical cries.
However, the more trips you made, the fewer blank pages there were. Analogue Mad Libs had its limitations.
I recently tested Amazon’s Mad Lib-style actions in the Amazon Echo Show 5 Kids edition. This is very similar to the Amazon Echo Show 5 (2nd Gen) we reviewed in 2021, but with built-in parental controls and content filters. It’s also home to Amazon’s Create with Alexa beta, which the company announced in September and officially launches today (November 29).
When I heard about these AI storytelling skills, I didn’t think much of them. In fact, I might have turned them down because the AIs are out there writing some prose with online news (opens in a new tab) you read and, frankly, it rubs me the wrong way.
Create with Alexa—even in beta—is not the kind of cold, impersonal AI content generator that burns my shorts. It’s a kid- and adults-friendly story maker that combines the essence of Mad Libs (no official affiliation with the brand) with the power of AI, but in a way that puts you in control.
To begin with, we told Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa, “Let’s make history.” This kicked off the AI creative beta and its kid-friendly interface. He guided us through selecting a few plot settings and character details:
- Place: I chose space
- Character: I made my monkey
- Character name: “Twiggy” sounded good to me
- Type of person: I went with “lazy”.
Like Mad Libs (no official affiliation with Amazon), hints are designed to help push the story in increasingly weird (but always kid-safe) directions.
The prompts are curated and offer a relatively limited set of options and themes, including underwater, enchanted forest, and space exploration, with only four customization options (story hero, character name, descriptive word, color). Anything outside these predefined prompts is ignored by the system. In other words, you can’t build a crazy story out of your personal information (name, address, etc.)
Amazon told me that the system uses three different AIs to construct a whimsical story. It uses a language model trained on stories written by people. Secondly, it uses an AI scene generation model to build the background, properly place objects and plot themes in the scene, and even give facial expressions to the characters. You can call the third AI “The Conductor” because it generates what Amazon calls “complementary music” for your story.
All these AIs raise the level of volatility of each story, which means that even with the same prompts, you can end up with a different story.
This is all well and good, but for all I know, these AIs can also be comedians. The resulting story was as ridiculous as any Mad Lib we’d made while driving from Colorado to Florida.
Here is an example snippet:
“Twiggy used the blue, star-filled Sun to broadcast his Jokes to all the stars and the moon. The audience loved what they saw, and Twiggy didn’t tire of being funny as they watched him.”
Where Mad Libs ends and Create with Alexa potentially kicks off is the system’s ability to preserve those silly details of the story and the character you co-created with it to eventually feed into other stories. Basically, Twiggy could, with a future update, be my main space money in unlimited stories co-written by AI/humans.
Your original stories are stored in a personalized media gallery so you can view and play them whenever you want.
What I like about this concept is that it’s not just a child or anyone staring at another screen waiting for him to tell them a different story and keep them entertained. Creative AI is by definition an effort of co-creation. The story doesn’t progress or go anywhere without input from your child or you (or both of you together). It’s a clever way to use AI without letting it take over.
The experience is designed to work on all Echo Show devices. With Amazon dropping the price of the Echo Show 5 for kids this holiday shopping season, I think Create with Alexa might be why you’re picking this deal up.