But yes, natural language as an interface requires higher activation energy versus GUI which hampers how much value Alexa Skills (and GPT) can provide.
When I look at Amazon’s skills page, it’s a wasteland. Until there’s something worth surfacing, discoverability doesn’t really matter.
That said, I do have two Echos in my house (and one Home Pod) and use them all the time for basic things.
The problem is that the set of supported operations are always MUCH smaller than the set of operations people randomly try. You might develop a skill with 200 commands or whatever and think you've covered everything, but people can up with thousands of possible commands just by guessing.
This means if people just do "I'll try asking this..." then probably 80% of the time it won't work. That's an incredibly frustrating experience. You quickly give up and just stick to the features that you know work, and never try to find any new ones.
But I also disagree that OpenAI has the same problem, because LLMs means you don't need to manually add thousands of possible commands, so any random request that people make is MUCH more likely to work.