Chatty Cathy was a doll. You could pull this string on her and she would say something random. She was the first electronic fortune cookie. She could say  maybe a dozen and a half different things. Never anything cogent. Some tangy things to keep your interest, some sweet things to butter you up, but nothing to piss you off by design.

So it is with Alexa. Algorithm rather than string. Marketing to lonely people. A pretense that your voice phonons in a virtual world, in  conversation with a remote server, is real.

Handy, but not real. Handy as a voice activated search engine (there are others). Handy if you want to listen and nobody else wants to talk…