The Amazon Echo Amazon | YouTube

While investors pressure Apple to address youth phone addiction, experts are more optimistic about the voice-enabled smart speakers that Google and Amazon want to plunk into your living room. At their most ambitious, Amazon's Echo and Google's Home devices are meant to transform the way you manage your life and control your home, using artificial intelligence to put an ever-increasing range of capabilities at your command. But at their most basic, they simply allow you to spend less time tapping away on a screen. And as Apple's current scrutiny underscores, that can be particularly important when it comes to kids. Solace Shen, a researcher at Cornell who has studied children's interactions with intelligent technology, says she sees a big opportunity for educational and entertainment content on these devices that doesn't suck kids in in the same way that a smartphone would. "Playing a game with an adult or another child using a voice-enabled device, you're not focused on a screen, so the interaction encourages you to look at each other and pay attention to each other," Shen explains. "That's a unique advantage of these voice enabled systems. If they're designed right, they can be unobtrusive, but speak up when needed."

Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Both Google and Amazon already have a wide range of children's content available, including trivia games, stories, and interactive question sessions with characters from the likes of Sesame Street or Disney. They also both have ways to set up profiles for young children with parental controls to easily monitor usage and what a kid has access to. And both companies have plans to keep expanding their offerings in the coming year. "You're going to see us invest heavily in expanding both the experiences and the content we produce for kids and families in 2018," Raunaq Shah, a Google Home product manager, told late last year. "The reception to the features that we've launched so far has been tremendous and there's really a huge opportunity for us to make the experience for kids and families even better." He highlights how the communal and public nature of these devices can allow parents to feel better about letting kids get comfortable with them — it's hard to have secrets when everything you ask gets logged in a mutually accessible search history or can be heard out loud when you ask it. Plus, kids can be entertained or informed without the dopamine hit of notifications that come when you fire up a phone. "If you watch a kid with the smartphone, all the bells and whistles are just so seductive and addictive," says Marika Lindholm, sociologist and founder of ESME, a site for single moms. "With the Echo or the Home, there is the opportunity for much more listening and interaction." The barrage of notifications and social applications on a phone can cause anxiety and encourage a kind of digital relationship that just isn't possible with smart speakers as we know them now. And there are early signs that when people use smart speakers, their usage becomes a substitute for time on smartphones: Two-thirds of people who use digital voice assistants use their phones less often, according to a new survey published by tech consultancy Accenture.

In the end, parents must take control