Amazon Alexa to read Pac-Man and Lego Duplo stories

Many a tweaker will have played with Lego in his youth and some will even have operated Pac-Man earlier, to avoid or catch the ghosts. Amazon allows children of today to come into contact with it in a completely different way.

Amazon introduced a kid-centric Echo Dot speaker last week, and it turns out the tech company is serious about its kid-centric strategy, as some kid-focused skills are coming out this week for the Echo speakers’ Alexa assistant.

For example, children who have little inspiration when playing with Duplo can turn on the Lego Duplo Stories. There are ten interactive stories, five featuring vehicles and five featuring animals. While listening, Alexa gives building assignments, the assistant asks questions and, for example, animal sounds are played based on the game that toddlers can play. Children can also somewhat determine the course of the story. For example, in the story of the cat, they have to choose whether it is a domestic cat or a farm cat, the latter wanting to build a fortress of straw bales.

Bandai Namco will stick to a single story for now: Pac-Man and the Ghastly Garbage. Listeners must help save Pac-Man from the Garbage danger and along the way encounter old acquaintances such as Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde. According to Bandai Namco, it is an interactive story in which listeners determine the course and can win Power Pellets.

For now, the stories can only be heard in English. More similar skills are on the way, including from Sesame Street’s Elmo and the comic Beano.