Comment by bsimpson
The tension is that there's a big chasm of utility from those things until you're compete-with-Google-Search levels of good. I feel like I heard there was an Amazon UX study that said weather, music, and alarms/timers are all people use Alexa for. And even with the best LLM, that's probably all you want out of a smart speaker.
A whole bunch of assistants have gotten way worse in the last decade by chasing features at the expense of utility. I don't care about whatever new feature my speaker has, but if it fails to play a song or check the weather, I'm PISSED.
My original HomePod has recently regressed in its ability to play songs. It can no longer play one song after another without glitching and repeating a little bit of the previous song. It boggles my mind.