Amazon’s Alexa Wins The Digital Assistant Popularity Contest

Amazon’s voice-activated assistant Alexa has emerged as the most-used voice assistant on the market.

That’s according to Digital Trends, which — citing Amazon — reported Alexa is found in more than 60,000 smart home devices from 7,400 companies. That’s up from just 12,000 devices a year earlier. Digital Trends noted that in September Amazon said Alexa was now in 20,000 smart home devices, and underscores a fast trajectory for the digital personal assistant. The number of products that support Alexa has grown 200 percent in the past three quarters, noted the report. It also underscores the wide gap between Alexa and its rivals. Google’s Google Assistant, as of October of last year, worked in around 10,000 devices from more than 1,000 companies, noted the report.

The surge in the number of devices that support Alexa shouldn’t be too surprising given the success Amazon has documented for Alexa and Echo, its voice-activated smart speaker. In January Amazon’s senior vice president of devices and services, Dave Limp, told The Verge that more than 100 million devices with Alexa integrated into them have been sold so far. The 100 million trumps the number of phones that have Siri or Google Assistant preinstalled. With the Alexa devices, consumers chose to purchase Alexa as opposed to getting it preinstalled.

To grow the uses for Alexa, Amazon has reportedly been reaching out to consumer packaged goods companies in an effort to get more people to make purchases through voice shopping with Amazon Alexa. Late last year Recode reported Amazon wants the brands to pay a hefty price to include the smart speaker branding and an Alexa utterance in their advertising campaigns. In fact, Amazon is asking for millions of dollars’ worth of advertising impressions and months-long campaigns on non-Amazon platforms to include the mention. For companies that decide to sign on, Amazon will provide data about how well their product is performing within its category on the site, as well as some advertising on Amazon’s sites. In addition, Amazon will also help develop the brand’s skill.