The hype surrounding digital voice assistants have died out. It’s still useful in a few situations, but not having one isn’t as huge a defeat as it would have been 5 years ago. Microsoft could drop Cortana completely and be fine.

I had the same issue recently with a BMW voice activation system I was playing with. Mimicking an English accent worked for that one!

I would have spoken to it in a foreign language if they had let me. Instead, I have no idea to this day what Cortana sounds like.

That is a pet peeve that we have back home, because of market size, many US companies rather support Brazilian Portuguese than any of other variants.

European Portuguese gets left out due to market size, while African and Asian Portuguese get left out due to buying capabilites.

Thing is, having to speak to a device, in another language variant just feels weird, leaving out the little detail that one does need to learn the differences as well.

would you consider British English the only actual English?

Not only Brazil has 20 times the population of Portugal, but there are considerations to be made about how languages evolve in the periphery, which might not apply to Portuguese, but certainly apply to Canadian French vs French French.

Respect though.

Instead of paying for half working stuff and then complaying like many do here, I rather not give any money at all.

Alexa is the only one that turned out remotely useful for me.

However, when busy, it still feels faster to say "set timer for x minutes" with just a long press on the home button.

I tend to agree: I think switching it to a simple Bluetooth speaker is a reasonable way forward under the circumstances.

As a related aside this, along with a raft of other support withdrawals recently (the most recent that comes to mind is those smart glasses), I do feel somewhat vindicated in my policy to keep things as dumb as possible: speakers are just speakers, lightbulbs are just lightbulbs, my kettle is just a kettle, and - if I do need any smarts - I attach a general purpose computing device to provide them. E.g, it's just incredibly easy to connect my laptop or phone to my hi-fi via a DAC or audio interface to stream music over Spotify.

The point of this is that it means most of my household devices and appliances remain brick-proof, and I shouldn't have to keep replacing them every 3 - 5 years just because manufacturers stop supporting them.

I have a similar but marginally more lax policy: I'm fine with smart devices as long as they don't have to phone home to operate and they have on-device controls.

For obviously Internet of Shit-worthy appliances (Cory Doctorow's smart toaster or whatever) I'll always choose the dumb version, and I make sure that I only use home automation stuff that's as widely interoperable as possible, but otherwise I don't particularly fuss about it as long as it meets all of my other requirements.

I think modularity is really key here. As long as you can replace or update each component individually without impacting the rest of it, you should be good.

That's exactly it: the ability to easily swap out components, and then high levels of interoperability. I think I perhaps didn't express myself so well because I'm broadly in agreement with you. It's the phone home aspect that often makes smart devices a problem.

I think we've seen a lot of backlash where companies treat their (disposable) products as disposable, and this is a good thing to see.

Also, companies like Harman Kardon have lifetime relationships with their customers.

This is actually the hardest part for me to understand. They want me to drag a Win10 laptop everywhere to use the assistant instead of just using my phone?

[0] I say this with lament, because it was IMO a legitimately good phone OS. My Lumia 920 is still my backup phone, 8 years later, because the ones I got after that died before replacement. But the death was certainly not a surprise. Once they started adding more features to Android apps than existed in the Windows Phone versions, the writing was on the wall about where the money was going.