I acknowledge that other people have other preferences, but my criticism mainly relates to the way assistant and smart speaker companies have sunk so much money into a product that has limited utility and helps people in such a mild way.
People are willing to spend <$100 on a smart speaker and then never pay again. Meanwhile, Amazon is trying to make providing a free cloud service make sense by bundling it into Prime in hopes of being able to raise the cost of Prime as much as possible.
So I acknowledge that some people prefer this, but I think it's dumb enough that if I was a hypothetical investor back when these technologies were new I would not have gone anywhere near them.
