Alexa is a complicated rube goldberg machine of ML models. For instance, when asking, "play songs by michael jackson", it runs an entity resolution query to figure out who michael jackson is, and then retrieve his music. There are a ton of systems along the way to solve this. Tons of data pipelines, formatting, autiditing, rules based matching etc. But all of those brittle expensive systems can be replaced by a single LLM.

>I don't actually want to chat with the speaker I just want it to find my keys and set timers

Not to be snarky, but do you expect it to read your mind?

You have to communicate with it somehow. Now that you're using spoken language to communicate you need to actually decode the sounds into text, and then you need to decode the meaning and intent from those spoken words.

I have never seen a computer system as good at figuring out intent from comment statements at the Chat/Bing GPTs. So yea, at least to me it seems very useful.

I have a seen proper prompt translate commands into API calls. I imagine it’s doable even just with self hosted solutions like Home Assistant or homebridge.