Growth of Amazon Alexa skills from 2016 to 2019

In a little over three years, Amazon’s Alexa has gone from having 130 skills to over 100,000 skills as of September 2019. Introduced in November 2014, Alexa is a virtual assistant artificial intelligence technology developed by Amazon and used through Amazon’s services such as Amazon Echo.

Alexa’s used across the globe

    Virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa are increasingly becoming a commonplace feature of many consumer electronics devices. As the worldwide adoption of digital voice assistants continues to increase rapidly, so does the number of skills being performed by these devices. Amazon’s Alexa performs the most functions in the United States, followed by the United Kingdom, and India, as of January 2020. Alexa is the platform supported by the highest number of devices, estimated as high as 60,000 supported devices worldwide.

“Sorry, what did you say?”

   As the smart device industry continues to expand, companies are increasingly searching for wider and better uses of “smart” technology. Google’s Siri is ranked the highest in terms of its ability to correctly understand and answer to queries, while Siri and Alexa are next in line. Despite this, the accuracy of interpreting queries by consumers still remains the biggest hurdle to the worldwide adoption of voice technology. Many consumers worldwide find accent or dialect related recognition issues to be a major problem for voice technology adoption.