Should I Get An Alexa For The House?

Personally, no. What can come in, can go out. 

I've been in a friend's house and out of the blue Alexa said "Sorry, I didn't quite catch that", randomly without any prompting. 

There's always a price to pay. You gain convenience, but you will pay for it with your control. Control in the sense of your home being a place free from external influences steering your decisions. 

Whatever you say within Alexa's earshot will be used to improve the strike rate of the subsequent offerings you get from "Her". The more you use Alexa, the more likely you are to agree with her suggestions, her choices, her decisions.

 And as she, or the core algorithms governing the options you get presented with become more sophisticated, and Alexa's physical interface becomes more tangible and present in and around your home, the more comfortable you'll feel allowing Alexa to make decisions on your behalf in other areas of your life because in general her judgements consistently prove to be time and cost effective.

Eventually you'll reach a point where you no longer feel confident making any decisions solely by yourself before running it past Alexa first. 

For me, the one constant in man's relationship with technology is that, what man experiences as his increasing power in the world through wielding smarter technologies as a means to carry out HIS wishes to help him enact HIS agenda, are actually just some momentary flashes of systemic giddiness as humans continue along the unconsious path towards the goal of making themselves redundant through total externalisation of their entire skill set, everything can they do, into super servers owned by a handful of people on Earth. 

But I don't think anything I tell you mate will alter things in the slightest! You're gonna get one or an equivalent because they're really handy to have in a big house when you have 3 teenage (or soon to be) kids.

You say there comes a time when choosing the non-technological over the technological becomes liberating...Personally I think that time has long past. Like Neo, when he went to see the Oracle for the first time, we're not here to make a choice, we're here to understand the choice l we've already made. 

The only thing there is  now are the 50 shades of Yes to choose from. There is no 'No' to technology now. There's no stopping a current of this magnitude unless it stops itself because technology is the evolution of man, that includes the technologies of his self. 

So those who see themselves as equals, as part of the ongoing evolution of life and intelligence, part of technology's undolding destiny - will become androids or whatever the term may be for a machine governed by a human essence. And those who allow technology to govern them become drones.