Facepalm

I'd need more (and reliable) information to comment on your first statement.

For your second statement, there were apparently a limited number of devices which could process some commands locally, but most devices never had that capability to begin with. For the ones that could, it sounds like Amazon is deprecating the functionality. Does that sound correct? Either way, that's still a substantially different situation from having a device that's recording everything you say and uploading it to the cloud.