I don't understand why HNers are willing to buy smart speakers when we make such a fuss lamenting the fact that nobody makes dumb TVs anymore. Buy dumb speakers and connect them to a little PC so you can run whatever software you want.
Pure convenience here. Sure, 20 year old me would hate me for putting cloud connected smart speakers in my home but I'm not 20 anymore and available time was replaced by available money. I honestly looked and would have paid more for a fully local speech to text hub with basic apps and a nice API but there simply wasn't anything that looked like it wouldn't annoy the living hell out of me. I don't want to setup raspberry pis around my house, maintain and update weird open source stacks and whatnot. I want to stream stuff to speakers, control devices around the house through voice and sometimes use other convenience functions.
Fully realizing the hit on privacy, I understand the thing enough and, more importantly, trust my particular manufacturer enough that it simply outweighs that concern for me.
The Sonos experience was amazing. Great sounds, really simple to use, being able to play music in different rooms is cool, etc, and just plugging in the speakers into the power outlet without any extra cords really made for a great experience. It's much cleaner not having to worry about running speaker wire everywhere, or having laptops or rpis everywhere.
But they brick their older hardware or render them purposefully useless so as far as I'm concerned they are evil as fuck now.
A smart TV doesn't offer any value add for me - I have a chromecast, I have a recorder. By contrast, a smart speaker in the kitchen does add value. Being able to use Siri to set a timer, play music or add something to the shopping list when up to my elbows in cake mixture is of benefit.
