Our family uses Alexa for a few things.

  1. Music
  2. Family Room TV control (we lose the remote a lot)
  3. Interaction with the Home Automation system to a small 
 degree (mostly triggering scenes without needing to hit a button).
  4. Weather
  5. Timers/Reminders
  6. House-wide announcements

On the few occasions we've asked questions, the garbage responses have trained us to _not_ do that.

Edit: Forgot to include my point. The only things on that list we actively do that could justifiably say they need remote access to work are music streaming and weather. And we could be local on music if we limited ourselves to owned libraries instead of streaming services.

Pretty much the same list at my home.

I also use Siri on my apple watch for more personal things: todos, reminders, other me-specific interactions.

One issue I find to be huge but haven't seen mentioned in this thread is household assistants require shared accounts. So I can tell my watch "Remind me in 30 mins to buy that present for my partner" but if I did it on my Alexa they'd also see it. And thus we only use Alexa for truly household-wide things.

IMO a killer app would be voiceprint detection and an ability to funnel the speaker to their own account for things.

Alexa supports multiple profiles and voice print detection for profile owners. It's actually quit annoying TBH. I set it up a long time ago but it never really had any issues until recently. My wife's account is the one linked to the HA instance and it always voice prints me to my profile which isn't set up for HA control I guess. I'm not sure if they changed something about how HA stuff works on the backend or what, but I'll resolve it at some point.

I didn't realize it did voice print. Either I missed that or they didn't have it way back when we first got ours.

But yes, something where you could trivially say "these commands are generic, these commands are not" and it works perfectly would be the thing that puts a household voice assistant over the top for me.

We're close to that. Music, weather, alarms, and timers. Maybe an odd imdb or wikipedia trivia question now and then. I also use it to play as many pranks on the family as I can.

(btw, Alexa has become far worse at playing music in the last month or two... probably as an Amazon cost-saving matter.)

But, purely for those functions, it paid for itself in convenience in the first year. I'm happy with the purchase.

The sad fact is that all this could easily be done without privacy invasion --- but obviously not as cheaply.