This week, Larry sits down with Catherine Teitelbaum, head of Family Trust at Amazon and a former educator with over 25 years of online safety experience. Together, they explore how Alexa has evolved and discuss innovative ways families can use Alexa and other technology to play interactive games, get homework assistance or explore topics that spark curiosity.
Listen to their conversation below or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Transcript
Larry Magid: It’s always nice to connect with my old friend, Catherine Teitelbaum. Old, not in her age, but old in terms of how long she and I have been working together, going way back to Yahooligans, which was a Yahoo Kids project in the 90s, if you can believe it. Catherine is the head of Family Trust at Amazon, a former educator and industry veteran with 25 years experience.
In the fields of online safety, product policy, educational technology, and developing trustworthy digital products for more than a decade, Catherine’s held a senior position within Yahoo, as I mentioned, leading the award winning Yahooligans and Yahoo education products, as well as global policy initiatives.
Catherine was the chief trust and safety officer at Ask.fm. Leading the safety turnaround of the Teen Q&A app and as a consultant for a variety of popular social media apps. Most recently, Catherine led Trust and Safety at Twitch, Amazon’s popular live streaming service. Thank you. And yes, we did publish that as our first parent’s guide on how to think about technology and your children.
Larry: So let’s talk about your current role at Amazon Kids. First of all, what inspired you to join the team and talk a little bit about what you do there?
Catherine Teitelbaum: Well, as you mentioned, I am a former educator, so there’s nothing I like more than thinking about how to improve the lives of children and being able to talk to parents, help them think through their technology plan to understand our Amazon Kids products and really to think about how to integrate products such as ours that are built on a family foundation of trust and safety and how they can be comfortable using them with their families.
Larry: So, Catherine, it’s back to school time. And that’s the time when a lot of people think about what they’re going to be doing in terms of the digital lives of our children and our teachers and our parents. What does that mean?
What are people thinking about right now?
Catherine: I think about, like, how are the parents kind of coming to everything that is new? And I like to think about how technology can make their lives easier because there is so much new at the beginning of a school year. It’s literally a fresh start.
You have a new schedule, possibly a new school and teachers, and technology can make your life easier. I love one of the ways that parents use Alexa. I wish I’d had it when my son was younger. You can set a wake alarm. You can set a morning routine.
Like you could outsource, think about it: you could outsource reminders for brushing your teeth and making your bed. How cool is that?
Larry: The kids can get mad at Alexa instead of at you.
Catherine: Exactly.
Larry: Exactly.
Catherine: Alexa will also always have a joke on hand and a weather report. And things like that. Alexa doesn’t need to get their morning coffee first.
Larry: Yeah, we use it all the time. Our kids are grown up, but we use it all the time in our house for everything from checking the weather to finding who a certain actor is on television, to listening to music. And now we have a grandchild. So we’re listening to children’s music and, you know, back in the day, we would have had to go out and buy a bunch of CDs.
Now we just. Ask Alexa, and here comes the music.
Catherine: Right. And as your grandchild gets older, you know, Alexa has the ability, if a parent sets it up or a grownup sets it up, to recognize a child’s voice and will customize responses appropriately based on knowing it is a child.
Larry: Well, I have a task for your engineers. My grandchild is eight months old and she’s kind of trying to speak in ways that no human being can understand. But if Alexa could figure it out and translate it from baby talk to English, that would be an amazing technology.
Catherine: I will make a note of that.
Larry: I’m not sure we actually need that. No matter what, you talked a little bit about what’s new, what’s happening. Obviously. AI is such a huge factor right now for good and potentially for evil. Although, you know, I’m personally on the optimistic side of this, but it’s such a huge issue, especially in education, but in the home as well.
Talk a little bit about both from your perspective as an educator, former, you’re never really a former educator. You’re always an educator.
Catherine: Thank you. From your
Larry: perspective as an educator. And of course, your perspective at Amazon, where do you see AI playing a role right now?
Catherine: We are living in a time of rapid change, and we have to evolve as the technology evolves. We are continuing to build our products from the ground up with trust and safety at the forefront. And when we think about AI for kids, we think about how that can create a new way for children to interact with technology.
So one thing that I am watching, and this is inclusive of AI is technology that’s interactive and less passive. We have a version of that with our play together game where families are really loving it, but being able to have an interactive experience,
kind of uplifted or made a little more creative when the GAI is involved, and families are participating in that together.
Larry: Let’s segue back to you as a person and not necessarily with your Amazon hat on so you are a mom of a digital native, and I know that just because he’s in college doesn’t mean you’re no longer a mom. I’m still a dad and my kids are well into their careers.
Catherine: Oh, I hope I’m not done.
Larry: But just let’s talk a little bit about, you know, having gone through the, you, you raised an adult, you now have an adult child. And so on some levels, I guess you’re done, but on many others, you have more, you know, but talk a little bit about your experience as just, you know,
You’re at the point where he’s kind of on his own, at least as far as I think his digital diet is concerned.
Catherine: Yes. Yes. And I love that you said I raised an adult because that is something that we think of and talk about when we’re thinking, building tools as well. I think it’s really important for parents.
To think about technology the way you think about other areas of child development. reading. You don’t start by reading the world classics and chapter books, right? You start by reading picture books. And then you recognize words and then you build on that. From there it’s scaffolds, learning to have independence, crossing a street.
You start by holding on really tightly and progressively less tightly, and maybe at some point, you let go, but you’re still keeping your eyes on that child as that child crosses the street. Technology is the same. And I, you asked about my personal journey. I was involved at every agent stage. We had agreements in our family around technology, just like we would about, you know, crossing the street or going anywhere else. We had conversations about what our expectations were.
What he was allowed to do, he came to us and said, I wanted to do, you know, as he got older, these are the things I want to do. This is one of the reasons I like Amazon Kids so much and that I wanted to work on this product is that we’re enabling those conversations for families and providing settings that will help ensure that your expectations are met, but it’s important for families to have agreements and, you know, it’s back to school to take time in the calendar, or opportunities from the calendar to kind of reset those expectations as children get older, keeping in mind that eventually, you want your child to be knowledgeable, to be empowered for you to have trust that good decisions are being made in line with your family values and, and to feel comfortable, both the child and the parent that you have an adult that’s ready to go out the door.
Larry: No, I couldn’t agree more. And I was thinking about this the other day. My son, who’s in his late thirties, already hard to believe, wears a bike helmet. Now, not everybody wears a bike helmet. Not every teen, I see teens going by my house on the way to school. They have a bike helmet with them because they’re required by law, but they are often strapped to the handlebars.
But my kids wear a bike helmet and it’s a habit they developed. And that doesn’t mean that they Don’t take risks. Getting on a bike is risky, but they minimize the risk. They’ve learned, you know, and just as you and I do, getting into a car is risky, but we put our seatbelts on and we don’t drink if we drive.
And we try to stay at least somewhere near the speed limit. And I think about that with digital safety as well. The idea that it’s not about not doing anything. It’s not about putting the brakes on. It’s about doing it in a way. Which mitigates the risk. I wonder if you, from your perspective at Amazon as a parent, as an educator, what does that mean?
How do you take, I don’t want to, I shouldn’t use the word risk over and over, but How do you thrive? How do you explore? How do you, you know, just do things, but at the same time minimize the possibility of things going wrong in the world of digital technology?
Catherine: Right. The question that you’re asking in the context of ever-evolving technologies, and when we’re talking about parents and families, ever-evolving young humans, the children are never, you know, they’re, they’re not static. They’re changing too. I think first and foremost. There’s some peace to be gained by being involved.
I know you said my son is a digital native, and all the kids today are digital natives, but that doesn’t mean this is an area where my life experiences aren’t relevant or yours weren’t relevant to your children. This is not an area where parents should be hands off, but parents can be guides and they can be co passengers.
Around along the ride. I’ve always recommended that parents should educate themselves on the new technology. I think one of the most powerful ways you can educate yourself is by talking to your kids about what they’re excited about. What is the game that they want to play?
Why do they want to play it? How do they think about their privacy? One thing I’ve noticed with this generation, my son’s generation, is that they don’t think about privacy the way I do, they are comfortable sharing more about themselves than I am. And they are very well educated on privacy tools.
They know what settings, but that didn’t happen just by chance because we invested in teaching them that, when my son was young, he wanted to play a game on one of our shared devices. I wasn’t comfortable with it because I thought it was a little violent and, I was trying to, to not introduce that.
He forced the conversation. Over and over because he was persistent and fortunate. We listened and came to the plan of action that we would play it together before we played it. He played it separately and we played together. I would learn that it was not as dangerous as I thought it was.
That was his theory anyways. What ended up happening by playing it together, understanding the joy he received from it. We looked at risk. so we looked at risk and one way we mitigated it is we were able to close it so that he was only playing with people in his classroom.
People we knew in real life to start. We discovered that I like to build and he likes to blow things up, but okay.
Larry: And Catherine, you know, having been at Yahoo and all these other tech companies for your career, you are probably more tech savvy than the average person. But the fact is, whether you are tech savvy or not tech savvy, there’s a certain wisdom that comes with maturity.
It comes with being an adult. It comes with having been on the planet for a few decades. And you don’t have to be a tech guru to guide your children any more than you have to be an automotive guru to know how to drive a car safely. You just have to have some common sense and some life experience.
You need to kind of, like you did, look under the hood, so to speak of the technology a little bit, so you can figure out what’s appropriate, what isn’t, but so many people think it’s harder than it really is.
Catherine: I think that that may be changing. It was certainly right for prior generations.
But we now have families who are using Amazon Kids who grew up with instant messaging and gaining consoles and other things. So they have a level of comfort that perhaps prior generations didn’t. But they also have a level of enthusiasm that is, it’s super fun. We are building more and more play together experiences because we learned with our sketching guests that parents and children enjoyed this interaction and that the technology was additive to their relationships.
Larry: And the other thing that I’ve noticed about young parents is they also, they’re not naive. They have an appropriate level of skepticism about the fact that technology with all of its promises does have some things that have to be managed. They’re, you know, that I’m seeing more than I expected of parents being concerned and wanting to play an active role in making sure their kids are using it appropriately.
Catherine: Yes. And we launched a free parent dashboard 10 years ago, more than 10 years ago, for Amazon Kids. And it works seamlessly across our devices, the Kindle, the tablets, the, the echo devices. so that parents can set settings that further customize their child’s experience.
But the other thing that I think parents really value about the Amazon Kids products is that the Amazon Kids Plus subscription, which has tens of thousands of pieces of media, has been curated for age appropriateness so that they can step back and watch as their child freely explores. And they can have a peace of mind while that’s happening.
Larry: You know, I’m glad you mentioned that because there is this misperception out there that the internet is the Wild West. And while there are aspects of the internet that are really crazy and inappropriate and unpredictable, there are so many aspects that are well curated. I mean, Amazon Kids is the perfect example where you can go in there and you can control. What media your kids have access to. When I was a young parent, the only way I could control the media was to turn the TV knob onto PBS because they couldn’t watch junk programs that I didn’t want them to watch. And, of course, they quickly learned how to turn the knob. Now, there are so many more tools out there that if a parent wants to be engaged and figure out how to parent with a capital P, the tools are there.
Catherine: Yes, they are. And I think, you know, with the changing technology, we’re continually trying to kind of innovate around safety too, and thinking about how we, how we talk to parents, how we are incorporating trust and safety by design. In order to continue to earn our customers trust, we also need to help them with their family roles.
As you know, we partner with the experts in this field, like ConnectSafely. But we really feel like we want to provide some context for the decision making for parents. So not just the tools — we can make all the fancy tools that we want and all the different settings that we want.
What’s harder is to kind of do a deeper dive with families into the context. So, if you have a young child, what are the conversations you’re having? What types of settings are probably right? Also, if you have a family with multiple children and everyone’s doing their homework, what would make your life easier?
Well, it might be easier if Alexa gave some reminders as we discussed, we could outsource that. It might also be easier if you set up your tablet so that you need to do your 20 minutes of reading, if that’s assigned. Do that first. But giving parents some kind of examples and context so that they feel empowered.
Larry: Yeah, so when I look back at you, we were talking earlier about that booklet I wrote, Child Safety and the Information Highway, which I think I wrote in 1994. You know, There were some things that I didn’t think about back in the nineties that are top of mind today. And one of them is media literacy.
I worry about misinformation, disinformation, not understanding the difference between advertising and editorial content. Not understanding the difference between information, essentially propaganda or opinion, although propaganda and opinion are different, but still the idea that someone is trying to influence you.
What’s your thought about that, both from the standpoint of kids starting at whatever age, All the way up through you and me and our older adults.
Catherine: It’s a great question. and it’s funny, I actually wrote a media literacy curriculum for my third grade classroom more than 20, which is going on 30 years ago.
It looked a lot differently than the ones in the classroom now. But this is something that I am passionate about. For families, it’s important to start with conversations about the media that you are enjoying.
So if that is a book, you point out to, you know, this is the title of the book. This is the author. What is an author? Well, the author is the person that writes or draws the book. if you are reading fiction, it’s a fiction writer. And if teaching children the difference between that, and if you are reading a nonfiction book, what is the source of that information?
So if it’s a book about pandas, is it the World Wildlife Fund? Is it, you know, and just explaining that there are people behind it, these things don’t magically get created. also conscious choices when you are watching movies or videos together, you know, what is, is this true or is this make believe?
And parents naturally have these conversations with kids, especially around animations, you know, like, is that true? Or is that make believe? We were really excited to see some research. From the digital wellness lab that went into parasocial relationships and children very young do have relationships with the characters.
And there’s a lot we know about that. they, you know, from Elmo to big bird, children are able to discern between make believe. And real, but it is our job as grownups, I think, to reflect those differences and help them kind of categorize that,
Larry: You know, I’m glad you mentioned the World Wildlife Fund, because as a newly minted grandfather, I’ll have to think about this, you know, because in a year or so, my granddaughter will start consuming media like this.
It’s true. I mean, that’s an example of talking about what is a credible source, right? Are you fine? I mean, you know, these guys, these people know a lot about pandas. They study pandas. They’re researchers. They went to college to learn about animals like pandas. And not to say that the person down the street doesn’t have a valid opinion or maybe even a little knowledge about pandas, but there’s a difference between the random person who makes a comment about a panda and a scientist who studies them.
And that, that’s an interesting notion that you’re talking about because that’s how I feel about pandas. Today, as an adult, when I look at the difference between what I see from some random person on the internet who has an opinion about a medicine or a political point or something versus an authoritative source whose reputation is on the line and who has a great deal of expertise.
And I know there are those who want to discount expertise, want to discount science, but I still think it’s very valid.
Catherine: I do think it’s valid. And when I think back to my early teacher education, it wasn’t just, we weren’t being taught media literacy per se, but just basic literacy. you were taught to show children the fundamentals of a book and title, author, copyright, all those things that were part of it.
And that is still, I think, still relevant. And to your point about as children get older, what does that look like? Well, who are your reference materials? What were your sources? Even if you’re creating your own content, what were your sources for that opinion, for that report?
Larry: We talked a little bit about AI, but I want to talk about it a little more because it is such a huge issue. I can’t think of a single tech company that isn’t almost pivoting in that direction.
And as you mentioned, Amazon has been actually at it for a long time. I mean, even early Alexa had some AI in it and it’s getting more and more sophisticated. Where do you see it going? Not just with Amazon, but just in general, and where do you see it impacting our lives? As we finish out this decade and beyond.
Catherine: I don’t know that I’m that much of a futurist to be able to see that far. But one thing I’m excited about, is the interactive, technology generally, and the creativity. I think it’s going to inspire, let me give you an example of what I mean. A year and a half ago when I was hearing about AI in the classroom or with kids, what I was hearing was people were very nervous about cheating.
I heard it from my son’s teachers, even they were very concerned about cheating because it was, it made it easier to ask a answer to a kind of a more complex than just a search term, you know, summarize this book for me. What happened? There’s no more book reports. That was the concern.
Because the AI could do that and do that quickly. People were also concerned that the AI would hallucinate and come up with, you know, summarize this book, but they summarize a different book. What I’m seeing now is AI is kind of a launch pad. It’s an experience that can, Engage children in curiosity.
If you think about what we did simply with Explore with Alexa, where it was, kind of a kickoff for an Alexa led conversation that combines fun facts, but from a trusted source, it also allows for a more natural exploration. So a formerly we would say search on an elephant and you would get an elephant as a mammal, an elephant is large.
It has a trunk. I don’t know some simple facts, whereas now the AI can say, Oh, do you want a fact about it? Or do you want a joke or what else do you want now? And it will engage the child in kind of going. More playfully and the way children do right they don’t just go deep but they kind of take a winding road through their exploration and I Think we’re gonna see that both for the exploration side but also that the ability to create
Larry: Well, I’ve taken a winding road through this interview and Appreciate your flexibility.
Do you have anything to add? I think we’re pretty much gotten through most of the questions that I wanted to ask You
Catherine: You know, I’m really excited to talk to you and I’m excited for this new school year and seeing where families go. but no, this was great. Thank you. Great.
Larry: Thank you