20,000 Devices Support Amazon’s Alexa

Amazon’s famous artificial intelligence (A I) platform has become a force in the consumer market. At last week’s IFA consumer electronics conference in Berlin, Amazon announced that its Alexa app now works with more than 20,000 devices. This is an impressive advance, given that the firm said only last January that Alexa worked with 4,000 devices. A fivefold increase in eight months is almost unheard of for any product.

Daniel Rausch, an Amazon executive, said, “Alexa has sung Happy Birthday millions of times to customers, and she’s told over 100 million jokes.”

20,000 Devices = Fivefold Increase in Eight Months

Rausch confirmed that Alexa works with more than 20,000 devices made by 3,500 manufacturers.

Amazon manufactures its own Alexa devices, including the Echo smart speakers,  Fire TV. and Fire tablets. But the company has been trying trying to get the app into as multiple third-party devices.

What is Alexa?

Alexa is an artificial intelligence, or machine learning, app. It works in phones, speakers, TV sets, thermostats, and even cars. At this year’s IFA conference, Netgear and Huawei announced that the app would be in their home routers. Amazon said it wants to bring the app into hotels and offices.

Alexa now has more than 50,000 skills. Hundreds of thousands of developers in 180 countries work with it. Many more are coming.

Rausch is especially proud of Alexa’s voice control functions. “It turned out that your smart phone is actually a pretty terrible remote control for your house,” he said. “You don’t want to fish around in your pocket, open applications, unlock your phone to control the device right in front of you. Voice has truly unlocked the smart home. That’s because its actually simpler.”

“You won’t need a manual”, Rausch said, “becasue our devices learn about you, not the other way around.”

What are Amazon’s competitors doing?

Alexa is not alone in its market. It competes with Apple’s Siri, Google’s Home Assistant, and Microsoft’s Cortana. Alexa is by far the most successful, though. Other providers are scrambling to replicate its market penetration, and likely will take years to catch up. Still, they are moving energetically to get their apps into laptops, phones, appliances- even vehicles.

Amazon seems unworried about its competitors. Its Echo smart speaker leads the voice assistant market by a wide margin. And Rausch says his company “has barely scratched the surface” of what voice control can do.

Getting into 20,000 devices in four years is an impressive feat. But for Amazon, evidently, it’s just the beginning.

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