Amazon’s Alexa is expanding the ways it can play with kids. The smart assistant has a new story to tell through an interactive physical storybook, which stars the same Owl and Dragon cartoon character mascots that decorate Amazon’s current Echo Dot Kids speakers. 

The book is called Owl & Dragon, A Magical Adventure. It’s a paperback picture book for young readers, and it’s designed to be read while an Echo speaker plays an Alexa skill program called Readyland. It’s not the first Readyland book — they’ve been released since 2021 — but Owl and Dragon is the first to create a story for Amazon’s speaker characters. If it’s successful, it opens up the potential for Amazon to expand these characters into more forms of media.

The Owl and Dragon characters are modeled on the purple dragon and teal owl designs, which are printed on the 2022 release of the Echo Dot Kids speakers. The book from Readyland costs $15. It’s available for preorder today and will be released on Sept. 30. The book’s printed story can stand alone if you read each page, but you won’t get the full story experience without downloading the Readyland skill and listening to the audio adventure.

The idea is that a young kid can ask any Alexa-enabled device in the home to “Play Readyland,” but a parent can also play the audio side from their smartphone with the free Alexa app.

I tested the book with my own kids: My 7-year-old daughter, who’s already an independent reader of chapter books, and my 4-year-old son, who’s just starting to learn how to read. The Readyland book became an activity they enjoyed sharing together. Even though I’ve never had them play with an Alexa device before, they both picked up on how to interact with it immediately using the Echo Dot Kids speaker. And they were both hooked on seeing what happened on every page, shouting out answers to the voice question prompts.

You can think of Readyland as an audio entertainment program, where kids will hear a story with different voices, music and games woven throughout. Kids help the characters make decisions by answering specific prompts during their adventure. They can read along the one or two sentences printed on a page, but most of the experience is listening. The program tells kids when to turn to the next page, and kids have to say “Ready!” when they’ve turned the page and are ready to keep going with the story.

I liked being able to tell the app to stop at any time if we needed to pause the story. The next time the child asks Alexa to open the Readyland program, it asks them if they want to pick up where the story left off.

I was also impressed that the programming is savvy enough to understand the nuances of how little kids talk. It also has patience with little ones that may take a while to answer or may not use a word the program’s expecting. It will never say a kid is wrong — if the word isn’t recognized by the program, a character acknowledges something was said and pivots to the next point in the story. The Readyland program gives different nuggets of details about the story or characters depending on what a kid says: Many times the story is asking them to call out an image they see on the page, and kids have several choices of what to say.

Alexa has found its way into the playroom before, such as through board games and pretend kitchens, targeting parents who may already use an Echo speaker in the home. But this time, the play points to specific speakers. The book references the round Owl and Dragon speakers on the first and last page — those speakers cost $60 each and come with parental controls and a year’s subscription to Amazon’s Kids Plus service. (You don’t need those special speakers to read the books, but they look more fun.)

Seeing my kids use the Owl & Dragon book brought back my childhood memories of reading with Teddy Ruxpin, an animated toy bear from 1985 that told audio stories with music and sound effects of his adventures. Back then, kids like me would follow along with Teddy’s story with matching storybooks that had only a few sentences. The audio wasn’t streamed over a Wi-Fi speaker, it was played from a cassette tape in his belly. And the books back then made barely much sense without the Teddy Ruxpin audio to fill the gaps between pages.

Teddy got points for being a cool fuzzy bear that moved its mouth to talk. But kids today can actually talk back to these books using Alexa’s voice-recognition smarts. And the Readyland skill gives you something different in the story depending how you interact. 

I wouldn’t go so far as to say mom and dad don’t need to read bedtime stories anymore. Readyland just feels like a nicer way to give digital entertainment to a kid without handing them an iPad screen.