As a guardian, it may be daunting handy over a sensible gadget to their tween when a myriad of on-line risks exist. Pinwheel, a kid-friendly tech firm, is introducing a brand new answer for folks who wish to keep linked with their youngsters with out giving them a telephone.
The Pinwheel Watch is a just lately launched smartwatch designed particularly for teenagers aged 7 to 14, providing a child-safe different that forestalls entry to social media and the web. It options parental administration instruments, GPS monitoring, a digicam, voice-to-text messaging, enjoyable mini-games, and — right here’s a shock — an AI chatbot.
The smartwatch itself includes a smooth black design and a display screen that’s barely bigger than that of an Apple Watch. It’s at present priced at $160, with a $15 month-to-month subscription. It turned obtainable for buy on Pinwheel.com final week, and we’ve been testing it over the previous few days.
Along with a extra normal set of parental controls, the characteristic some mother and father is perhaps cautious of is the watch’s AI assistant, “PinwheelGPT.”
PinwheelGPT is designed as a safer different to typical AI chatbots, enabling children to ask questions on numerous subjects, together with on a regular basis curiosities, social interactions, and homework-related questions, the corporate claims.
Nonetheless, mother and father might already be cautious about AI chatbots, as they’ll produce misinformation. Dad and mom may additionally argue that the pleasant nature of chatbots can result in unhealthy patterns, the place youngsters depend on these digital companions for interplay as an alternative of partaking in face-to-face interactions with household and mates.
The corporate defined to us that safeguards are in place; the AI is educated to acknowledge subjects which may be delicate or inappropriate for kids, opting out of those conversations and inspiring children to debate such issues with a trusted grownup as an alternative. Throughout our restricted testing, we confirmed that PinwheelGPT efficiently prevented answering inappropriate or violent questions.
Moreover, mother and father have full visibility into all interactions with the chatbot, together with each present and beforehand deleted chats, to allow them to step in if any purple flags come up.
“We have now not obtained any pushback from mother and father as a result of it’s attainable, if they’re involved, to take away the PinwheelGPT from the watch or flip it off by way of your individual controls,” stated founder Dane Witbeck, who’s a father of 4. “We don’t use any private knowledge supplied by any customers, minors, or adults, in coaching AI fashions,” he famous.
Witbeck’s firm launched its first child-safe telephone in 2020 and, 4 years later, ranked No. 212 on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing corporations in America for 2024.
Getting into the smartwatch market looks as if a pure development, permitting the corporate to raised compete within the roughly $100 billion good wearable market towards main manufacturers like Apple and Fitbit. Pinwheel believes it’s strategically positioning itself by focusing particularly on the children class.
It additionally differentiates itself from different comparable gadgets, similar to Fitbit’s Ace LTE, which focuses extra on monitoring location and well being metrics.
Along with the AI characteristic, children and tweens could make calls and ship texts on the watch through the use of voice instructions or a keyboard. There’s additionally a digicam for video calls and selfies, together with a voice recorder app. Different apps embrace an alarm, calendar, calculator, and mini-games, similar to a Tetris-like sport.
The guardian monitoring options can be found via the “Caregiver” app. This enables mother and father to create a “Safelist” of contacts that their youngsters are permitted to speak to, in addition to reject sure telephone numbers from being added to the listing.
Moreover, a Schedule tab lets mother and father arrange completely different modes to make sure that children keep off their gadgets throughout particular instances, like once they’re in school or summer season camp. As an example, they’ll select to restrict contacts to solely emergency numbers through the day and change to “All mode” later within the day, permitting their children to entry all the pieces freely.
If desired, mother and father have the choice to watch textual content messages, which could possibly be significantly helpful for these with youthful youngsters. Right here, an AI textual content abstract characteristic affords mother and father concise overviews of youngsters’ textual content message threads.
The Pinwheel Watch is obtainable now within the U.S., Australia, Canada, and the U.Ok., with plans to increase into extra markets quickly. It is going to be obtainable on Amazon later this summer season, although the corporate has not supplied a particular date.