> I don't feel comfortable that there is a silent listening device lurking 24x7 for all family members

They are listening for the wake word. If they were streaming this data anywhere, people would notice. Heck, I would notice as I keep a close eye on them.

I find it amusing that you are not ok with Echo, but you are ok with a cellphone, which not only is listening all the time too ("Ok Google", "Hey Siri") but also has your location information, emails, photos, all sort of messages AND has its own backchannel to upload this information (the cellular data network), which is much more difficult to keep track of.

My Echos are not useless, when you add some home automation they become much more useful. They are still pretty "dumb" though.

We've yet to see any useful and no-nonsense functionality from that sound boxes I suppose. All the functions available today, like "weather" or "play a song" are definitely done faster by the phone - and by hands, with no voice command at all.

Every day I am at home for weather, timers, lists.

and phone does it all, plus being portable on-the-go

Yes and we even did all these things before a phone and life was fine. The question wasn't if I use the Echo to do things that are impossible otherwise.

I cook a lot and I find it a lot easier to just say "Alexa set a chicken timer for 15 minutes" or "Alexa add black pepper" than it is to get out my phone and do those things.

agreed -- being able to verbally set timers is very valuable to me. Also I have Lifx bulbs in my living room and it is much easier to tell Alexa to turn them on/off/change brightness than it is to get out my phone. I only use the phone app for that when I want to set up some custom color thing (which is pretty rare tbh)