They're only useful if you've got Phillips Hue lights installed. Other than that, smart speakers like Alexa and Google Home suck. This is coming from a former

They're only useful if you've got Phillips Hue lights installed. Other than that, smart speakers like Alexa and Google Home suck. This is coming from a former enthusiast who quit his job to build a cross-platform framework and SaaS for those things, and owned them in his home for years. I really wanted to like them. Trust is a big issue with these companies, but putting any conspiracy theories aside, they're just not very smart or useful. Under the hood, it's a glorified command-line that's voice activated, which is why spoken commands are often very inflexible; if you have to learn exactly what to say to it, then it's not much of an assistant or better than simply pressing buttons. They are also a form of vendor lock-in, as there's really no standard for writing VUIs(voice user interfaces) like there is for writing web applications. As a developer, you're stuck working with their crippled APIs, and everything has to go through their servers. Recent news around Google has convinced me to leave those devices unplugged for good. It was fun trying to "program" them, but after years both professionally and privately trying to come up with ways to make them useful, I always came up empty handed. If it weren't for the fact that they can control lights really well, I'd say they belong in a garbage can. Either way, they are a gateway to more of the surveillance economy. EDIT: Being able to play Amazon Music or Spotify on them would be useful if those VUIs, years later, still weren't a complete joke. It's nifty being able to ask smart speakers to play music until you've experienced enough times of it not recognizing particular bands or not finding songs/albums that are clearly in the mobile app. They suck.