Disclaimer: I don't have one of these and don't particularly want one. The privacy concerns kinda creep me out. That said, I've been to friends homes and seen them use it.
As far as I can tell the primary use case for these things is to be <random place in your home> and then just say out loud "Alexa, set a timer for ....". I've heard that you can order stuff from Amazon also using your voice. I think a third use case starts with "Alexa, tell me a joke".
I'm assuming that there's other things you can do with these (and would love to know, if anyone's willing to share).
So - if the solution to the privacy concern is to walk over to the device and push a button then that seems to remove most of the usefulness of the device.
Speaking as someone who doesn't want one / doesn't have one of these things I can totally see how eliminating the "voice control from anywhere" feature leads to opting out of it.
(When I'm walking around my home I've always got my phone on me (which, to be fair, has a bunch of privacy concerns too) so I can more easily set a timer / buy something on Amazon / Google for jokes by fishing my phone out of my pocket and then using that, rather than walking over to push a button.)
(The "what else can you do with these" is a genuine question - if people are comfortable sharing I'd love to hear what you can do with these)
As far as I can tell the primary use case for these things is to be <random place in your home> and then just say out loud "Alexa, set a timer for ....". I've heard that you can order stuff from Amazon also using your voice. I think a third use case starts with "Alexa, tell me a joke".
I'm assuming that there's other things you can do with these (and would love to know, if anyone's willing to share).
So - if the solution to the privacy concern is to walk over to the device and push a button then that seems to remove most of the usefulness of the device. Speaking as someone who doesn't want one / doesn't have one of these things I can totally see how eliminating the "voice control from anywhere" feature leads to opting out of it.
(When I'm walking around my home I've always got my phone on me (which, to be fair, has a bunch of privacy concerns too) so I can more easily set a timer / buy something on Amazon / Google for jokes by fishing my phone out of my pocket and then using that, rather than walking over to push a button.)
(The "what else can you do with these" is a genuine question - if people are comfortable sharing I'd love to hear what you can do with these)