I felt the same way and held off on getting an Echo for a long time. I thought it was too expensive at the $99 price point that it was originally sold under, in fact.

I broke down and got one on sale for $129-ish because it seemed to be the cheapest it was ever going to get.

It's nice to play with but I don't think it was worth the money for us. It is certainly a powerful speaker and if you're in the market for a good Bluetooth speaker, many of which are $200+, it's probably worthwhile. If you're just using it as a voice assistant, I think the Android/iOS VAs are probably better and I don't think they're really much less accessible -- everyone's phone is near them all the time and you can program Androids at least to unlock and execute your query upon hearing "OK Google".

The microphones do not work as well as advertised. We often have to repeat the hotword several times after turning our heads toward the device to get it to activate. After activation, it has bad noise filtering, doesn't work well in noisy environments. I have a Dot in my office (much quieter than the main area where there are 5 little tykes running around screeching all the time) and even it will struggle if my oscillating fan is blowing in its direction. It will also misunderstand and start answering totally different questions or performing totally different tasks somewhat frequently.

We tried one or two times to use the voice ordering functionality, but it's just plain unwieldy and we've never executed an order from it. I don't know if anyone actually uses that or not. It's hard to buy something without the visual confirmation and Alexa reads out the whole title. You'll say "Buy Ziploc bags" and it will say "I found Ziploc Plastic Bag 24 Count 1-gallon size Ziploc bags for $5.19, do you want buy it?" and then you say no and it says "I found Ziploc Plastic Bag Plastic 12 Count 1-gallon size Ziploc bags for $3.19, do you want to buy it?". Who wants to shop/browse like that when they could reach into their phone and buy it on the Amazon app with quick visual review of the available options and easy price comparison (don't have to remember "Oh yeah, was the 12 count $5 or $3")?

The Alexa backend service is not very good at answering random questions, which diminishes the device's utility. If you're not asking one of its canned tasks, it usually says "I can't understand the question I heard" or "Hmm, I don't know the answer to that question". The "OK Google" on Android is much more versatile and I've never used Siri myself, but it appears to be much more versatile as well.

My 3 year old daughter loves to ask it "Alexa, where do jumping monkeys live?" and get back "Hmm, I can't understand the question I heard". She laughs for a long time at this response and sometimes says "You're dumb Alexa".

We mainly use it as a voice-controlled timer ("set a timer for x minutes"), checking the weather, checking the news ("play my flash briefing", which, ugh), and doing quick math ("what's 341 minus 114?"). We also play songs on it, my kids think it's hilarious to run up to it and say "Play Bananaphone!!". They then dance around to Bananaphone. All of these things work nearly-identically (usually slightly better) with my phone's voice assistant.

So yeah, Echos are fun, but in terms of unique value proposition, they are pretty soft. Your phone's built-in voice assistant does everything Alexa does and more. The Echo can sometimes be more convenient if you're in the right spot in the right room and it's hard to reach your phone at that particular moment, but otherwise I don't think it brings a lot to the table. Honestly it's biggest value is as a powerful and vibrant Bluetooth speaker.