As a mother or father, it may be daunting at hand over a sensible machine 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 related with their kids with out giving them a cellphone.
The Pinwheel Watch is a lately launched smartwatch designed particularly for youths aged 7 to 14, providing a child-safe various that stops 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 encompasses 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 grew to become 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 function some mother and father is likely to be cautious of is the watch’s AI assistant, “PinwheelGPT.”
PinwheelGPT is designed as a safer various to typical AI chatbots, enabling children to ask questions on varied subjects, together with on a regular basis curiosities, social interactions, and homework-related questions, the corporate claims.
Nonetheless, mother and father could already be cautious about AI chatbots, as they will produce misinformation. Dad and mom might additionally argue that the pleasant nature of chatbots can result in unhealthy patterns, the place kids depend on these digital companions for interplay as an alternative of partaking in face-to-face interactions with household and buddies.
The corporate defined to us that safeguards are in place; the AI is skilled to acknowledge subjects that could 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 averted 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’ve got not acquired 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,” mentioned founder Dane Witbeck, who’s a father of 4. “We don’t use any private information supplied by any customers, minors, or adults, in coaching AI fashions,” he famous.
Witbeck’s firm launched its first child-safe cellphone in 2020 and, 4 years later, ranked No. 212 on the Inc. 5000 record of the fastest-growing firms in America for 2024.
Coming into the smartwatch market looks as if a pure development, permitting the corporate to raised compete within the roughly $100 billion good wearable market in opposition to main manufacturers like Apple and Fitbit. Pinwheel believes it’s strategically positioning itself by focusing particularly on the youngsters class.
It additionally differentiates itself from different comparable units, similar to Fitbit’s Ace LTE, which focuses extra on monitoring location and well being metrics.
Along with the AI function, children and tweens could make calls and ship texts on the watch by utilizing voice instructions or a keyboard. There’s additionally a digicam for video calls and selfies, together with a voice recorder app. Different apps embody an alarm, calendar, calculator, and mini-games, similar to a Tetris-like sport.
The mother or father monitoring options can be found by way of the “Caregiver” app. This permits mother and father to create a “Safelist” of contacts that their kids are permitted to speak to, in addition to reject sure cellphone numbers from being added to the record.
Moreover, a Schedule tab lets mother and father arrange totally different modes to make sure that children keep off their units throughout particular occasions, like once they’re at college or summer time camp. As an illustration, they will select to restrict contacts to solely emergency numbers throughout the day and change to “All mode” later within the day, permitting their children to entry every little thing freely.
If desired, mother and father have the choice to observe textual content messages, which might be notably helpful for these with youthful kids. Right here, an AI textual content abstract function provides mother and father concise overviews of youngsters’ textual content message threads.
The Pinwheel Watch is accessible now within the U.S., Australia, Canada, and the U.Ok., with plans to develop into further markets quickly. Will probably be obtainable on Amazon later this summer time, although the corporate has not supplied a particular date.
