Amazon Senior Vice President of Devices Dave Limp has revealed in an interview that they have sold more than 100 million Alexa devices, an astonishing figure if we compare the figure with the number of devices which have Google Assistant or other AI, assistants. Dave further went on to state that Echo Dot has also outstripped their holiday sales expectations and the product is sold out through January, with Amazon transporting them in pallets through 747 airlines.
While the figure is indeed a commendable one but if we go on a comparison in terms of software as in how many devices does Alexa run on and then compare it to Siri and Google Assistant, then the competition gets fairly tougher. Because Siri and Google Assistant come preinstalled on most mobile devices and only some would consider replacing them with either Alexa or Cortana, the global majority is still small. However, Alexa currently works on more than 150 different third-party products and the company is not afraid of experimentation with other startups as well.
So while Google and Apple have their assistants running on possibly billions of devices, Amazon is quickly picking up the pace with different hardware products using Alexa’s capabilities. Dave said that Amazon is still a big believer in multiple assistants and they won’t ever restrict a hardware startup to just Alexa alone, which fairly leaves the market open for fair competition. They want to make an impact through results rather than a flashy ad campaign.
Have you used any Alexa device? How was your experience with it?
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