The Raspberry Pi, with the release of the Zero W, has finally hit the point where it's feasible and affordable to hack together such a device and keep the build cost under the sale price of the Amazon Echo Dot.
There is an actual reason to use the cloud for apps like this: there is enough data to power the machine learning algorithms at scale. Although I'm a hardware hacker I know I'd never be able to build a homebrew Echo running completely in my own house.
This should be closer to the top :) Sadly many consumers don't understand exactly what they're buying into.
I've been slowly upgrading stuff in my house but steering clear of wifi only devices. They just don't work that well to begin with. Only exception being my nest thermostat - but that can even work offline, just with limited functionality.
1. Ignorance.
2. Not-invented-here syndrome.
3. They want to own your IOT ecosystem with their proprietary protocol.
Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice...
Don't buy anything "cloud powered/IoT stuff" unless you know what you are doing and the product has been vetted by the general public and you're aware that there will be breaches
Right now the number of IoT stuff I intend to buy is Zero