re: I just got an echo dot... What can I do with it?

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A lot of this sounds like stuff that a smart phone (Siri) already does?

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It's always on, for the 6s and later that is a setting for Siri, but for earlier iPhones you have to use the home button to activate Siri. Sometimes your phone is in the other room charging, Echo/Dot is meant to be relatively stationary so it should always be there when you need it in your primary use cases. It also has the option to hardwire into old school speakers, so if you want to play your music over something besides a bluetooth speaker, it can be set up for that without having to hook up your phone.

For now the use case is pretty limited outside of timers, music and the smart home. But it's a pretty open platform that people are doing a lot of homemade hacks for. There's a custom hack where you can get Alexa to control a Roku and even get it to control Plex on Roku "Alexa tell Roku to Play Star Trek Beyond on Plex" and that makes Roku launch Plex and do a search for Star Trek Beyond and it plays it once it finds it. Unfortunately it requires some home hacking to set up, but make something like that an official easy to install skill, and make a skill for the grocery list app I use, and I'd use Alexa quite a bit.