Amazon executive Daniel Rausch stood onstage before a crowd of hundreds at Berlin’s IFA tech show Saturday to share a few big numbers about Alexa;
“Just this year, Alexa has sung Happy Birthday millions of times to customers, and she’s told over 100 million jokes.”
At the start of this year, Alexa was integrated into over 4,000 devices. Rausch, Amazon’s vice president of smart home, said Saturday that Alexa is now in over 20,000 devices — a fivefold increase in just eight months. The number of brands using Alexa shot up to 3,500 from 1,200 during the same time. Highlighting that growth, IFA brought with it a slew of new Alexa-powered devices, including the Huawei AI Cube smart speaker, Asus ZenBook laptops and Yale’s Sync home alarm system, CNet reports.
Alexa comes pre-installed on a number of Amazon products such as the Echo smart speaker and Fire tablets. Alexa’s growth highlights just how far speech recognition software has come over the past few years, introducing the world of voice computing to millions of people.
Amazon’s Alexa faces lots of competition from lots of other voice assistants. Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, Microsoft’s Cortana and Samsung’s Bixby.
