Every 65+ person I know has one of those alexa-speaker things. Nobody I know under 65 has one. I wonder if there's just some generational expectation for a fixed household object, like phones and televisions were for people in the twentieth century.

I still have them. I use them for kitchen timers, alarm clocks, a quick weather forecast, random maths and unit conversions, and whatever I want to activate with Home Assistant. There's one on the night stand with a clock on the front that I never need to set, that adjusts its brightness automatically based on ambient light, and which gets used as a Bluetooth speaker for the tablet that I watch dumb shit on YouTube with sometimes.

So, like: The light switch in the garage is very inconveniently-located, and it's dark AF in there both at night and when I walk in from a bright sunny day. The lights can be activated by voice and that's pretty nice to have.

They're also good when I want background music that's actually-in-the-background: I've got some very nice audio systems for when I want focus on listening to music, but they are much more successful at being involving than at being being ignored. The kinda-meh-sounding Alexa-type widget on the table over there does a better job for background noise.

I'm not anywhere near 60 yet. I just find that stuff like this is useful.

(Yeah, yeah. I could build or buy voice-controlled speaker-widgets that integrate with Home Assistant in an open-source way, and even use them with a local LLM if I wanted to. I'm disinterested in that kind of effort at this time.)

we all bought those for our parents, or just as likely, gave them to our parents after we were done with them

Funny. I had those for years and years (very early adoption), and have since gotten rid of them.