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As soon as you see them for what they are it makes perfect sense. They're basically a proxy to google search with extra dumb features on top. Every single feature that isn't google search has been hard coded (map directions, setup alarms, &c.), as soon as you get out of the hard coded cases it's blatantly obvious these things are anything but "smart"

imho they're just used to give google/amazon a few more data points for their graphs

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Yeah, and that wouldn't be a problem if the discovery story wasn't dismal or the browsing story wasn't dismal, but it definitely is. On both counts.

Discovery and browsing are not good on the assistant interface but I'd argue that's a constraint of voice vs visual. On a desktop/mobile, the screen holds the state so you can go back to previous entries, etc. Over voice, you mind holds the state which scales much much worse.

To the credit of the Shortcuts team at Apple, being able to visually select and define certain phrases for commonly completed tasks is helpful in this regard, but I’d guess only a couple % of the user base is even aware that Siri Shortcuts are possible.

Is this just normal phone Siri or HomePod Siri?

Normal phone Siri. Not sure if it works for the HomePod

And this would be a much better situation if users could hardcode their own features and definitions.

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