Part of why people only use it for timers is because of its limited capability to understand. „Do I need an umbrella today?“ results in Alexa telling me what the weather will be like without mentioning chance of rain. Asking a trivia question leads to it reading out a response that is wrong 50% of the time. If I ask Alexa to remind me at 8, it asks me whether am or pm though I expressed it unambiguously in German. If I don’t use the right phrasing to snooze a reminder it asks me what I want to be reminded of. And so on, and so forth.
I like it when I ask it for the hours of a shop near me, it gives me the hours of some store with the same name literally thousands of kilometers away every time despite knowing my exact address.
The other part is that timers are ridiculously immediately useful. Other questions require far more context. Do you need an umbrella? In the next hour, or the next 6 hours? To walk around town, or just to your car? Do you actually have a handy working umbrella?
