More than 100 million devices with Amazon’s Alexa assistant pre-installed have been sold, the company said Friday.
The new metric, revealed by Amazon devices SVP Dave Limp in an interview with The Verge, showcases just how quickly the company has crammed the voice assistant into disparate hardware devices and shoved them out the door. The company did not distinguish further how many of these items were Amazon-built Echo devices and how many were designed by third-party OEMs.
The company’s vision of encapsulating Alexa in anything with a circuit board was evident at its September hardware event where it announced more than a dozen new devices, including a clock, a microwave and some redesigns of existing products like the Echo. In the interview, Limp shares that there are more than 150 Alexa-integrated hardware devices on the market, most of which shipped in 2018.
When it comes to the 100 million number, that metric seems impressive for a platform that still seems to have so much room left to mature, but it also shows how aggressive the company has had to be to keep up with Google Assistant and Siri, which obviously have significant reach on Android and iOS, respectively. Alexa seems to occupy a more exclusive smart home presence than Google, which has managed to ship quite a few of its Google Home devices, especially the Google Home Mini.
Amazon’s low-cost Echo Dot similarly seems to be capturing the bulk of attention. The device was updated in September with a new design and a louder speaker. The company is also seeing success with hardware it hasn’t released yet; the company revealed that they’ve had more than 1 million people sign up for an invite to buy an Alexa Auto device ahead of its launch.
