Hello, I'm Tristan. The Amazon Echo Show is a really useful device: it has a touchscreen
which makes it really easy to manage your smart home, play music, and even surf YouTube. But this
sometimes has a downside: if YouTube is playing and your children are nearby, one moment it'll
be playing Blippi. You quickly turn around, and 5 seconds later it's playing Slipknot.
Well that's actually probably not the worst thing it could be playing, but you get my
point. The touch-screen makes it a bit TOO easy for anyone to surf YouTube and play random videos.
It's also not helped by the fact that your children can just say "Alexa, open YouTube"
and YouTube will appear, ready for tiny fingers to scroll and choose whatever video they want.
Thankfully, there's a better way.
"Alexa, open YouTube"
"No, go away"
Just kidding. But thankfully, there ARE effective ways that allow you to either
make YouTube "kid safe", OR you can block standard YouTube completely and instead have YouTube Kids
running on your Echo Show. Let's dive into how to do this. I'll start by showing how to
"enable" YouTube Kids on the Echo Show, but sometimes this can be a bit slow (or buggy),
so at the end of this video, I'll then cover how to "child-proof" standard YouTube instead.
Right, so the first thing to know is that the Echo Show is NOT app based. You can't just "uninstall"
YouTube, and "install" YouTube Kids like you can on an Android or iOS phone. The Echo Show
uses fairly custom software, and the main way that you access 'internet stuff' (to use
the technical term) is via a bundled web browser. This used to be Firefox, but now it's Amazon Silk.
And thankfully YouTube Kids isn't just a mobile app: it's also a website,
available at youtubekids.com. So 'enabling' YouTube Kids is mainly just a case of opening the
web browser by saying "Alexa, open Silk", then typing "youtubekids.com" into the address bar.
Oh yeah, you then have to sign-in - which is a REALLY buggy and annoying process, and it
might make you cry. When you first go to YouTube Kids, you'll notice that the layout is broken.
Thankfully you can fix this by hitting the desktop icon to the right of the address bar. Then it's
"simply" a case of following the instructions - which involves watching a video, signing into
your YouTube/Google account, then the webpage crashing and you having to start all over again.
Seriously, I'm not joking. After logging in, the webpage will probably show a white box. You then
have to refresh the page, and start over again - meaning you need to watch the same video again.
But thankfully the second time around, the login process should work - allowing
you to THEN get onto the screen where you can enter your children's details.
After what feels like an eternity, you will finally be on YouTube Kids and your children
can surf it freely - and you can be safe in the knowledge that there aren't any
"no safe for work" videos there. Naturally it's still worth monitoring
what your children are watching and flagging any videos that you don't feel are acceptable,
but it's still good to have "enabled" YouTube Kids.
Enjoying watching Blippi and Dave and Ava kids (... and parents).
But of course, there's a downside. Your children
can still say "Alexa, open YouTube" - or select standard YouTube from the bookmarks.
And then they're back to watching Slipknot or whatever kids watch these days.
So how can you stop this? Well, ladies and gentlemen, I have a cunning
four-point plan to build back better. Sorry about my terrible American accent
there. There's four things you can do to "block" standard YouTube on your Echo Show.
Firstly, you can remove the bookmark by clicking the bookmark icon, clicking the YouTube bookmark,
and pressing "Remove bookmark". It'll ask you to confirm your choice.
This will make it harder for your children to open standard YouTube on your Echo Show,
because the bookmark is no longer there, of course.
Next up, we need to stop the Echo Show from opening YouTube when someone says "Alexa,
open YouTube". This is also simple to do, via an Alexa routine in the app.
So if you launch your Alexa app, click the "More" menu and then "Routines". Press the plus icon
to add a new routine. You want the trigger here to be when someone says "open YouTube".
Next we want to "hi-jack" this, basically. So add an action, and choose "Customized".
Enter "open Silk". Select "The device you spoke to", and hit save. This will then open
the Silk web browser, instead of YouTube, when someone says "Alexa, open YouTube".
Score! I'm so cool.
Moving on,, it's now harder for your children to access standard YouTube - but it's still
available in the browser history, meaning that it'll show up in the address bar.
So you'll want to clear this, by opening Silk, then clicking the bookmarks icon,
and then "Settings". Select "Privacy and security", and then "Clear browsing data".
After doing this, the standard YouTube won't appear anywhere on the Echo Show.
This should be enough for most people, but if you have an Eero or similar-capability router,
you could of course look to block "m.youtube.com" - to completely block access to standard YouTube.
In the Eero app, you can even block "m.youtube.com" just from specific
devices (such as only your Amazon Echo devices), by using profiles. I won't
cover the exact process here because it varies per router, but this could be worth exploring.
That should be all you need to do to fully enable YouTube kids, and block standard
YouTube. But what happens if YouTube Kids is too slow or buggy on your Echo Show? It is on one of
the two of my Echo Shows, weirdly. In this case, you will unfortunately need to go back to standard
YouTube - but thankfully there ARE some steps you can take to make this safer for your children.
The first thing you'll need to do is sign-in. This is because by default, YouTube is logged out so it
can't as easily 'learn' what videos to suggest. To login, click the person icon at the top, enter
your email address and password, and within a few seconds you should be logged in. This process
should be much smoother than the annoying YouTube Kids login process (that made me cry earlier on).
Now the video recommendations should be a bit more tailored to you or your children.
You might even want to register a specific account for your children to use on YouTube,
instead of them using your own one.
Next up, now that you have signed in, you can enable "Restricted Mode" which will screen out
mature content. This is a crucial step. To do this, click the person icon at the top,
then scroll down to "Settings". Next, click "Account" and toggle "Restricted Mode" to be on.
Naturally there's a warning that no filter is 100% accurate, but this should
hopefully be good enough to filter out really inappropriate and 'not safe for work' content.
Thirdly, since you are now signed in, you should start flagging up any videos or channels
that are inappropriate by clicking on the three dots next to a video
or channel. At first this can be a bit repetitive,
but YouTube will soon learn what sort of videos and channels you do and don't want to see.
Fourthly, you should start actually watching children's videos on this Echo Show.
Yes I know that you probably don't want to watch Dave and Ava for the thousandth time,
but viewing videos is a really important way that YouTube learns what videos to recommend.
You should only need to watch the first few seconds - so if you know that your children love
certain channels, search for them and watch a few of their videos.
You might also want to subscribe to those channels (just like you're subscribed to my channel,
right? RIGHT?!), since this will also help tailor the YouTube video recommendations.
The benefit of logging into YouTube on the Echo Show is that all of the
settings and recommendations you have made will be stored against the account.
So if you purchase another Echo Show in the future, you can sign in there
too and the recommendations should be child-safe there too.
And that just about wraps up today's video. I love my two Echo Show devices and the ease of
access to YouTube is useful, but also a bit of a worry. So I hope that the tips I've shown in
today's video have helped you. If they have, please click the "thumbs up" button which will
tell YouTube that more people should see this video. Please also subscribe to this channel,
and click the bell icon - which will notify you when I release new videos. Thank you!