It isn't even one year since the press stories about how dumb a product Alexa was and how it makes no money and all the devs are getting laid off. Something changed now?
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I bought two the second they were announced, I already use the software stack with the m5 atoms and they are terrible devices, but the software works well enough for me.
A lot has changed in the open source ecosystem since commercial assistants were first launched. We have reliable open source wakeword detectors, and cheap/free LLMs can do the intent parsing, response generation, and even action calling.
Alexa, on the other hand, won't even allow a third party app to read its shopping list. It's no longer clear to me why Alexa even exists any more except as a kitchen timer.
So yeah, Alexa is a dumb product... for Amazon. No one uses Alexa to buy anything from Amazon because the only way you can be sure of what you're ordering from Amazon is to be looking at the site. Otherwise you might get cat food from "JOYFUNG BEST Brand 2024" and not Purina.
Voice Assistants for Home Automation, like what Home Assistant is offering, are awesome. And this in particular is exciting exactly because of Alexa's failure as a product. Amazon clearly does not care about Alexa now, its been getting worse as they try to shoehorn in more and more monetization strategies.