For me they are all useless.

Portuguese is usually not supported, and if it is, usually is the Brazilian variant, and I don't feel like playing accents just for making myself understood.

Also I have a multi-cultural life, so something like sending an email to someone usually requires at very least two languages, which those devices don't support.

I only have seen one guy asking Siri a question to this day. Everybody in the room was frowning to that, he never repeated it.

Killing Cortana is one of the first steps of everybody I know who switched to Win10.

Haven't seen an Amazon Echos yet, not even in flats which homeowners use a massive amount of home automation gadgets.

- East German

I'm seeing more people get Google Homes and Amazon Echos now compared to when they first came out. It's still a novelty for most people. I was reading a newspaper the other morning at the kitchen counter when I looked over at the Echo my mom got my dad for Valentines Day. I realized I could just ask Alexa for the news but then I wouldn't have the convenience of just skimming headlines. I would have to verbally skip to the next story and that just felt like a lot more effort than continuing to read the paper. We don't have any other home automation devices in the house like the Nest thermostat or any Hues. I feel like if I had a lot more connected devices in the home, then having something like an Echo or some other hub for controlling them would be necessary.

Personal anecdote: I got one free at AWS re:Invent. I use it to play music of my choice (specific songs or playlist categories, which requires a subscription after trial period), set timers ("alexa set timer for 45 minutes"; "alexa how much time is left on the timer?"), do various calculations ("alexa what is 1 plus 1?" -> "1 plus 1 is two, but you already knew that"), and ask what time a nearby business closes ("alexa when does Target close?" yields the closing time of the nearest target based in the location I have set. If it's closed, it says when it opens next). Other than that, it's mostly just a novelty that I forget about 99% of the time.

My mom got her first smartphone, an iPhone 7 Plus last christmas.

She is using Siri a lot.

That and taking videos/pictures of everything :)

I saw an Amazon Echo on a colleagues desktop, still packed up. It felt a bit weird.

It's not really common here and I actually don't know a single person who uses Siri etc. actively. I'm sure it got some attention after it was introduced, but only for the novelty of it.

However, I recently bought a German Amazon Dot device and I think I'll keep it. Right now, it's main job is to play music but I also use it for setting timers and to tell me the current time and weather. I've never used other "voice-based assistants" before but I can see the benefits that come with a dedicated device like the Amazon Echo. It's really comfortable if you can control things with your voice, you don't have to get to your PC or smartphone first. I'll probably integrate it with my home automation system to control lighting, and maybe add a media center like Plex/XMBC, too.

Edit: The only thing that bothers me is that the German voice is not as fine-tuned as the English one, and as of now there are not many skills available (built-in as well as third party), so I switched it to English. But guess what - you can't use the English skills unless you port your German Amazon account to amazon.com... the Echo is essentially handled like a kindle device on the server side, which means you'll lose all your eBooks and music if you switch...

German is one of the 2 languages Alexa supports, so they must use it a little

There are other countries speaking German, that have a different outlook on privacy.

However, as usual there are parts of the german society that won't have any issues using stuff like Alexa. "I have nothing to hide" is also a popular way of thinking in Germany, history be damned.

What other countries? Neither Austria nor Switzerland have a much different view on privacy.

I went out of an IT-project targeting Germany, France and Austria with the impression that the view on privacy in Austria is a lot more relaxed, and at least the interpretation of its privacy laws was less strict as well.

Could be a subjective impression, linked to the project and wrong when looking at the bigger society, but at least so far I believed it. I acknowledge that Austria was also part of the streetview hysteria that broke the project over here. Might be a differing indicator.

You would be surprised. Echo was released here quite recently, and adoption, at least in my demographic (webdev) is quite high. I myself have an echo dot which I use mostly to control my lights or annoy my friends with crappy jokes and the occasional easter egg.