I think this is 99% caused by advertising in itself. One of the oft-forgotten facts about ads is that they can not only influence you to choose between competitors for irrational reasons, but they can very often influence you into buying something that you didn't need at all. In fact, this is often the primary purpose, as Amazon for example profits more from you owning a Siri speaker than they do from you not owning a smart speaker at all (since part of their stock price will be influenced by the size of the overall smart speaker market, not just their slice of it).

Alternatively you could buy Apples homepod, I can't imagine they want to torpedo their brand so completely that your homepod won't be broken by then anyway.

You underestimate what people will sacrifice in order to be able to ask their phone about the weather instead of taking a look through the window.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

I really hate this argument. You can't reliably determine the exact temperature or future weather conditions by looking out of the window.

Serious question since I've never owned a smart phone. Do they not come with a browser? If they do, you can look up your zip code on weather.gov [1] and then expand it to show more details, then bookmark the result. The URL will remain the same for that zip code. At least for the U.S. that is quite accurate. Does the E.U. have a similar site? If you want to hear the weather, then you could bookmark ATIS [2] for your area. Can you launch an app or a bookmarked page using built-in support for voice commands on smart phones?

[1] - https://www.weather.gov/

[2] - https://www.liveatc.net/

Or use HomePod and Siri and you don’t have to worry about your trading privacy for convinience.

Really when people talk about nefarious smart speakers, they are really saying “Google, Amazon, Facebook.”

It is possible to have a smart speaker that isn’t spying on you or trying to sell you stuff.