We use them to control lights (Insteon) or more recently the garage door.

The Dot is easily one of my top 5 kitchen gadgets, it handles multiple concurrent timers, it's hands free so you don't get schmoo from your hands all over it, it can do unit conversions (e.g. How many teaspoons in a cup?), and math (e.g. What is 5 times 1/3?).

These are all things you can do yourself but just as you might ask someone "what's 54.32 * 3?" to save yourself some mental gymnastics, you can ask Alexa those same types of questions.