Retiring Alexa
Alexa has been fine. In 2017 I decided to buy one of the earlier smart speakers. At the time I would have preferred to get a Cortana enabled speaker. The Invoke speaker was something I looked into. The Invoke was designed to work with the Cortana virtual assistant from Microsoft. I owned a Windows PC, a WindowsPhone, used Microsoft services. The natural thing was to go for the Invoke. The one problem was that the Invoke speaker was only available in the USA. It assumed US regional settings. This included things like the voice and understanding transport from the perspective of car ownership. It also didn't understand that weather should use celsius in the UK. In the long term Microsoft had no interest in smart speakers and it disappeared from sale everywhere. The choice in 2017 seemed to be Google Home and Amazon Alexa . Privacy worries play into this. Whatever the choice these devices will have microphones in my home. Google seemed to be cheap, privacy invasive and poor sound