Because they’re currently better than nothing. My HomePod works 90% of the time. I can create specific scenes for the things she can’t quite figure out.
Being able to walk in to the kitchen and tell her to put the radio or the light or a specific album or a timer on is actually really amazing. Most of the time. Certainly amazing enough to suffer the times she doesn’t want to co-operate, because then I just do that myself which I would have done anyway.
It helps that the HomePod is also a great speaker in its own right, and that it’s one single cylinder with one cord. It’s a very tidy device.
The only use case I see which has an acceptable failure rate is asking for the time and setting a timer. And even asking for the time fails about 1/10 times with the Alexa system my gf has in her flat...
And if asking for the time is the only thing which works decently, well, that is really telling about the state of the art...
If these things would actually work, I'd definitely use one regularily. However, whenever I visit an Alexa owner, I realize after a few interactions that I really couldn't be bothered with this stuff.
I think the "taxi" problem is still around with Siri. Put any taxi organisation into your phonebook, and include "taxi" in the name. You will likely not be able to call it with siri, since it insists to search for taxis in your area. Its always the same bug. These things have absolutely no idea about the context. And some hand-crafted rules go haywire after a while, because apparently nobody reviews them. When I got my first iPhone (iOS 5) I put in my date of birth during configuration, and promptly noticed that the german speech synthesizers says Nineteenseventynine when I enter 1979. All aother 4-digit numbers are fine, only 1979 is pronounced english. So apparently someone put this exception in there for a completely bogus reason, and it stayed there. It is still there today, after 8 years.