The era of open voice assistants

That's a pretty timely release considering Alexa and the Google assistant devices seem to have plateaued or are on the decline.

Curious what you mean by that.

For me the Alexa devices I own have gotten worse. Can't do simple things (setting a timer used to be instant, now it takes 10-15 seconds of thinking assuming it heard properly), playing music is a joke (will try to play through Deezer even though I disaled that integration months ago, and then will default to Amazon Music instead of Spotify which is set as the default).

And then even simple skills can't understand what I'm asking 60% of the time. The first maybe 2 years after launch it seemed like everything worked pretty good but since then it's been a frustrating decline.

Currently they are relagated to timers and music, and it can't even manage those half the time anymore.

That’s interesting because I have a bunch of Echos of various types in my house and my timers and answers are instant. Is it possible your internet connection is wonky or you have a slow DNS server or congested Wi-Fi? I don’t have the absolute newest devices but the one in my bedroom is the very original Echo that I got during their preview stage, the one in my kitchen is the Echo Show 7” and I have a bunch of puck ones and spherical ones (don’t remember the generations) around the house. One did die at one point after years of use and got replaced but it was in my kids room so I suspect it was subject to some abuse.