Do either of them actually provide any value (apart from homepod audio quality)? For the life of me I can't find a reason to have one of these in my house and I really am not concerned about the privacy issues.
I bought them for the audio quality primarily. I do use Siri with it daily, and it's fine/passable. I have it read me the weather, my calendar events, reminders, and play the news.
This is a weird #LifeHack, but I have one in my bathroom, and a bathroom HomePod/Alexa is the best place to put one. Each morning in the shower, I can ask it about my day, then I usually have it play NPR, Bloomberg, or read the news. At doing that, it definitely is more than serviceable for me.
Controlling lights, fans, HVAC, TV (shield, amp, etc), Todo and shopping lists, cooking/laundry timers, reminders, tracking baby (diapers, bottles, nursing), weather.
Being able to turn on a light and track baby events while you're up to your elbows in poop is really invaluable.
Definitely won't add smart locks anywhere in the mix.
Limited music since we use Google music.
Also, Celery Man.
Had to Google that. Clearly I've been missing out by not having cable.
Wife and even mother-in-law can just say "Hey Siri Play Disney Radio" or whatever and it always just works and the baby can dance around to music.
If they are watching Netflix or Hulu or Disney Jr or HBO or etc they just just say "Hey Siri Volume Up" or "Hey Siri Pause" even if the Apple TV remote has made its way under the couch.
When we walk downstairs in the morning we can just whisper (so to not wake the baby) "hey siri turn the downstairs lights on" and it always just works.
"Hey Siri what's the temperate in [the baby's name]'s room?" "Hey Siri raise the temperate a couple degrees"
It would be a BIG deal to remove this from our life right now as we use it for so many things.
That doesn't happen. They may ask for the requests you have made to the device, but they won't simply listen to your conversations. These things are not sending realtime audio to AWS servers 24/7. We would know.
Timers (for both cooking and reminding the kids to do something)
Asking for music when I'm rocking a baby
Using the intercom function to remind my daughter to pee without getting up.
Using the announce function to tell the whole house that the water heater is broken while I'm in the shower (this happens about once a week because I'm too cheap to replace the controller board on the heater and it can only be reset by pushing a physical button).
Also they tell me when someone is at the door because I have a ring doorbell.
I don't get this. My doorbell just rings a chime that I can hear and know someone is at the door.
Much of the functionality seems like it'd be great for a disabled person. But I'm not, and none of it seems like it would improve my life any.
They can do basically what Siri/'Ok Google' already do, except on a stationary location. For Echo in particular, there's a bunch of skills you can enable, from fart jokes to re-ordering your last Pizza on Domino's. If you have the full device (Echo, not the dot), it's also a pretty decent speaker. During the california fires I was constantly asking it about the air quality.
Kids love it. For jokes, to simple math problems, and wikipedia-like answers.
If you have more than one, they can call each other. Poor man's intercom. They can also play music together.
If you have a FireTV, it can control that. Good when you have misplaced the remote.
If you have smart devices, then things get more interesting. They can control groups of devices. When I say "Alexa, goodnight", lights are turned off, bedroom air filter is turned on, as are the security cameras (would be even better with thermostats and whatnot).
If you can program, you can also build skills for them. Then they will do whatever you want them to do.
I've also recently created a few routines which are fun -- "Good morning" triggers a good morning response, lights on, the weather and news, and some light music. It really does feel like the future scifi promised us...