I've avoided Alexa for years. I've never had any interest in anything voice controlled. Anyway one day at the Amazon checkout, Amazon wanted to sell me an Echo

I've avoided Alexa for years. I've never had any interest in anything voice controlled. Anyway one day at the Amazon checkout, Amazon wanted to sell me an Echo Pop for I think it was $20. I figured I'll give it a try, I can afford to lose $20 and not be too grumpy about it. I found the whole experience very underwhelming. Alexa frequently misunderstood me. At one time I tried asking it to play a particular type of music and it said I require a subscription. I tried some of the skills and they were total garbage. And then there are the privacy issues. I live alone so I was not too concerned but I would always make sure it was off before using the phone. The only thing I would really want to use a product like Alexa for and pay for it with a subscription is if I could use it for language learning. But my bar for this is very high. I'm not interested in something that just feeds me phrases to learn. It would need to combine the capabilities of ChatGPT with the ability to adapt its output to my level, provide useful feedback, and have excellent voice recognition for bad accents and the ability to suggest improvements to my pronunciation and grammar. I don't see this happening any time soon.