Meanwhile multiple non-technical people that I know pay $20/mo to OpenAI and have long, verbal conversations with ChatGPT every day to learn new things, explore ideas, reflect, etc.

These are obviously what voice assistants should do, the research was just not there. Amazon was unwilling to invest in the long-term research to make that a reality, because of a myopic focus on easy-to-measure KPIs. After pouring billions of dollars into Alexa. A catastrophic management failure.

How does that eliminate the need for the graceful shutdown the author discusses?