I feel like there are just not many truly game changing use-cases for a voice-activated assistant.
They only ever seem to be useful if you do not have free hands (e.g. cooking) which is why they are almost exclusively used as timers (at least in my household). I have tried getting it to read a recipe but that's just cumbersome (I often want to have a quick glance at ingredients, not have someone list all of them in slow succession).
Other actions such as "play stranger things on netflix" seem like useful actions at first, but again only really make sense if you are truly busy with your hands (which you would not be if you are on the couch with the remote near-by). Using the remote to turn on the tv and play something on netflix is often not more than two or three button presses (assuming the show is in your 'continue watching' list, which it usually is if it's something you specifically want to watch).
And turning on lights? Again, a novelty. Unless your house is designed in a weird way where your light switches are on opposite ends of the room you are walking into, it's always faster to just flip the switch when walking into the room than shouting out and waiting for your assistant to do it for you (never mind the fact that shouting to turn on the lights during a bathroom run at night would be highly annoying to other household members).
I like my routine that turns off my entire house when I go to sleep at night, because I'm ADHD and I won't flip off lights or the TV leaving a room as a general rule--especially in the evenings when I'm low-meds. With the recent heat-sensing models, I could even automate them to be presence detecting lights and fix that issue room by room.
I also like being able to sequence the set of several lighting, audio, and video operations that sets my theater room up for various uses. I like being able to quickly check the house temp and tweak the thermostat from the other side of the house. And I like being able to turn whole rooms on and off at once, or to set their light dimness and color for my use of the moment without getting up or fiddling with my phone, etc.
I especially like the routine that does a sunrise wake on my bedroom lights; turns off my brown noise machine a minute before my alarm since sometimes that will peacefully wake me without having to hear the beep; chatters jokes, news, etc, incessantly at me in the morning once I dismiss my alarm to make sure I actually get up; then automatically shifts into whole-house Sirius XM to play hard rock as I start my day.
And say what you want, I like being able to ask the thing over my shoulder what my office fan 5 feet behind me is set to and change that while coding and still looking at the screen, rather than stopping, screwing around with a cheap remote control and trying to see a little LCD from across the room. Like I said, I'm ADHD. If I stop to do that, who knows when I get back on task again.
I agree for simple "turn on a switch" tasks they're way overkill, but for actual automation (and perhaps accommodation) these devices are useful, especially once you start replacing ALL your environmental devices with controllable ones. It's more a question as to whether you can leverage the automation.
Are you using Home Assistant? You seem to be all in and I've started doing the research to get my place setup. I think I would like voice commands for quick actions but would like to avoid giving my voice data to Amazon, Google, Apple, etc. There seem to be some limited open source models, but their support currently seems limited.
I have not tried Home Assistant, no, but I'm keeping an eye on what happens with Matter. If I were able to consolidate the interaction to a neutral third party that could control the other stuff I already have, I'd love to do that.
They only ever seem to be useful if you do not have free hands (e.g. cooking) which is why they are almost exclusively used as timers (at least in my household). I have tried getting it to read a recipe but that's just cumbersome (I often want to have a quick glance at ingredients, not have someone list all of them in slow succession).
Other actions such as "play stranger things on netflix" seem like useful actions at first, but again only really make sense if you are truly busy with your hands (which you would not be if you are on the couch with the remote near-by). Using the remote to turn on the tv and play something on netflix is often not more than two or three button presses (assuming the show is in your 'continue watching' list, which it usually is if it's something you specifically want to watch).
And turning on lights? Again, a novelty. Unless your house is designed in a weird way where your light switches are on opposite ends of the room you are walking into, it's always faster to just flip the switch when walking into the room than shouting out and waiting for your assistant to do it for you (never mind the fact that shouting to turn on the lights during a bathroom run at night would be highly annoying to other household members).