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Smart speakers are useless in an emergency.
If there is a power failure in your suburb, town or village, you will not be able to power the smart speaker and even if you could the internet will not work to supply the radio station's signal.
If the power failure is longer than 3 hours not only does the internet fail, so does the landline phone and the mobile phone cell tower battery goes flat.
In the recent bushfire emergency 1400 mobile phone base stations failed mostly due to the power line to the cell tower being burnt down. Lastly mobile phones have to transmit every 15 min to tell the phone system which cell it is in so that you can get incoming calls.
In contrast broadcast transmitters cover much larger areas than the 10 - 30 km radius of a cell phone tower and many have generator backup.
This leaves the broadcast radio as the only way to contact the community in an emergency.