But could it have been done with the resilience/volume/sound quality/redundancy/etc of the speaker?
A situation that comes to mind is a vendor stepping away to go to the bathroom, and asking their neighboring vendor to sell while they are gone. A cheap enough, but fail proof and versatile solution is not necessarily a waste.
At less than a USD a month--currency vs. cost of living conversion--this subscription is extremely cheap considering the many positives: confirmation of payment from a new revenue stream, multiple language support, low-ish latency, fraud prevention for the seller. While a lot of Indians have smartphones, this speaker is the ideal example of a device that solves one specific problem and nothing else.
A situation that comes to mind is a vendor stepping away to go to the bathroom, and asking their neighboring vendor to sell while they are gone. A cheap enough, but fail proof and versatile solution is not necessarily a waste.