Greenlight started out as a tool to give your kids a debit card that you can easily track spending, and the company added chore tracking so parents could reward chores financially without needing to crack out their Venmo or have cash handy. Greenlight says parents then mentioned how they used the spending notifications to keep an eye on where their kids were, so the company added family location tracking through its apps, and launched a GPS tracker for smaller children who wouldn’t have a phone that could be tracked.

Now, Greenlight has launched the Family Hub to bring those features into a single device, plus a calendar. It’s made both for the family overall and for smaller children who don’t have a phone, so they can still use it to track their chores. The calendar aspect also works well and updates quickly to reflect changes I make on other devices, which I like.

It sounds a little Big Brother-y with all that tracking involved, but I understand the appeal as a parent who wants to be involved and keep an eye on things without expecting constant text updates. But I can feel the limitations sometimes with Greenlight’s approach to helping parents manage their kids, versus the entire family. Chores, for example, are only for children, and you can’t set up this hub without creating a child account with it. So if you’re just a married couple or household of roommates, you’ll be annoyed to list yourself as a child to use the chore tool.

But my favorite features aren’t what Greenlight is known for, at least not originally. This hub not only has free, unlimited storage for its photo screensaver, but also has the option to get voice support. That voice support is behind a paywall, requiring either $10 a month or $100 for the year, but it’s a feature I’ve long thought these devices need. It won’t connect to your smart-home devices, but will answer questions about the weather or your calendar and let you set timers, and it will prompt family members to add the parent PIN if they try to command any serious changes to the calendars or chore lists. Greenlight’s voice assistant worked well to understand my questions, but it was easy to trigger without actually saying the wake words “Hey Greenlight.”

You’ll need to make sure to follow the setup steps carefully if you don’t want to set up a financial account for your child. When I first signed up with the Greenlight app, I hit the button to create an account instead of choosing “Set up a Family Hub,” which got me stuck on the financial path. Greenlight’s support had to go in and reset my account for me, and it was spooky how fast the app pulled my legal name and information from just my phone number. Greenlight says it’s fixing this in its app so that it’s easier for people to back out and switch to hub setup only, but it’s something to look out for.

A Calendar for Small Kids

If you want a digital calendar made just for kids, Skylight has something along those lines called the Skylight Buddy. Originally it was just a chore and routine gadget, reflecting only his assigned tasks and habits from the Skylight app, but Skylight added a calendar feature so my son can now see the events tagged onto his personal calendar.