Just in September, Amazon announced some amazing results.

Alexa currently has more than 50,000 skills worldwide, is compatible with 20,000 devices, and is used by more than 3,500 brands. Compared to 4,000 devices and 1,200 brands at the beginning of 2018, Alexa has made rapid progress!

And that’s exactly what Amazon smart Home VP Daniel Rausch revealed at IFA, according to Voicebot. ai.

Meanwhile, Alexa was only compatible with 4,000 devices at the start of 2018, which meant a 400% increase in about eight months. This number shows how Quickly Alexa compatibility has become the industry standard.

Rausch also revealed during his IFA talk that as of January, there were only 1,200 brands using Alexa. Now, there are 3,500! Brands are increasingly turning their attention to voice, and Alexa, today’s global market share leader, is the preferred starting point.

The rapid growth of AlexaCopy the code

“Alexa sang Happy Birthday to users millions of times this year. And she told jokes over 100 million times.”

When FastCompany spoke with Steve Abuchin, vp of Amazon Alexa, he revealed that Alexa had 40,000 skills before May 3 this year. Assuming that the timing of announcements is roughly related to the number of Alexa skills currently available, Alexa skills seem to be growing at a rate of 10,000 skills every 121 days!

Alexa is a virtual intelligent voice personal assistant of Amazon, which is designed by Amazon Lab126 and is loaded in Amazon Echo series products: The standard Echo (second generation device), Echo Plus, Echo Look, Echo Show, Echo Dot, and Echo Spot (there’s also an Echo Tap in the U.S.) officially debuted in 2014.

When Amazon launched Echo in 2014, it was primarily marketed as a “smart speaker,” and Alexa, which powers the Echo, only promised to help you control your music.

But since then, Alexa’s virtual agents have become more powerful and become the control center of the smart home — Alexa listens to a user’s voice commands and responds to them to get a job done. It supports music playback, voice interaction, playback of audio and video, creating to-do lists, and providing traffic and weather updates for home automation devices.

Today, Alexa is experiencing rapid growth, with the number of devices logged in quadrupling in just eight months, as mentioned above. Meanwhile, the number of brands using Alexa skyrocketed from 1,200 to more than 3,500.

Amazon also showed off a number of new Alexa devices at IFA, including huawei’s AI Cube smart speaker, Asus ZenBook laptop and Yale’s Sync home alarm system.

Amazon has even integrated Alexa into cars, offices and hotels. Amazon has also defined Alexa’s vision directly as: Alexa will be where you are. Alexa will be there to chat with you whenever you need it.

Not only that, Alexa is driving business growth for device makers.

Dealerscope’s Rob Stott reports that Rausch also showed how Alexa integration directly affects device manufacturers’ business.

According to data cited by Rausch, businesses saw a 43% increase in business in the nine months after launching Alexa-enabled products; When a company combines Alexa functionality with its products, businesses on average see an almost immediate 53 percent increase in their business.

That says, first, consumers are interested in Alexa-compatible or fully Alexa-enabled products; Second, increased consumer buying is generating more revenue for device makers.

There's a strong competitor on the horizonCopy the code

Despite Amazon’s desire to make Alexa the go-to assistant, Alexa faces some serious competition. Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, Microsoft’s Cortana and Samsung’s Bixby are all making their way to laptops, cars, phones and home appliances, among others.

But on August 15, 2018, Amazon and Microsoft jointly announced that Alexa and Cortana, their voice assistants, have been integrated, giving users access to each other’s voice assistant functions.

Alexa is already available as a dedicated app on Windows10 PCS, and Alexa, amazon’s digital assistant, may also appear on Microsoft’s Xbox One game console.

The integration will help Alexa and Cortana better compete with Siri, apple’s voice assistant, and GoogleAssistant.

In addition, Google Assistant has emerged as the strongest competitor to Amazon’s Alexa.

Google Assistant has been available on Pixel phones and GoogleHome smart speakers since its launch, and limited editions have been available in the Allo app. At Google I/O in 2017, Google CEO Sundar Pichai went so far as to say that Google Assistant, along with search, is the most important product or service vehicle for Google’s machine learning technology.

According to eMarketer, about two-thirds of U.S. smart speaker enthusiasts will now use Amazon Echo, compared with 30% for Google Home.

However, CNBC also reported that while Amazon Alexa has a larger market share and commercial advantage, Google may have an advantage in natural language processing due to its history as a search giant, And Google Assistant’s main advantage is that it’s part of the overall Google ecosystem.

Alexa, for example, is also vulnerable to smartphones compared to Google Assistant and Siri because of their deep integration with Android and iOS, respectively. Alexa, by contrast, has a first-mover advantage with the Echo as a smart speaker, and is transferring that momentum to other Alexa-enabled devices.

Alexa, of course, is also keeping up the momentum. According to Rausch and CNET reports, Alexa has thousands of skill developers in 180 countries. At the beginning of 2017, Alexa was estimated to have fewer than 15,000 developers.

This tells us, first of all, that Amazon increased support for Alexa developers at least 14-fold in about 20 months. And the interest in Alexa is not limited to countries where language localised versions are available.

Tortuous road, bright futureCopy the code

In addition to the competitors mentioned above, another obstacle in the development of Amazon Alexa is security and privacy issues.

Concerns about data privacy and security are growing in the wake of the Facebook data scandal. These problems could slow down the use of voice assistants and microphones, or scare off some potential customers altogether.

In addition, as we noted last week, the success of iot devices like amazon’s Echo and GoogleHome has created an opportunity for developers to build voice-activated apps and then link them more deeply into customers’ daily lives. But at the same time, the possibility of exploiting certain features of speech recognition machine learning systems for malicious purposes is also increasing, according to a team at the University of Illinois.

All of which could slow Alexa’s adoption and growth.

Of course, Daniel sees Alexa’s future as bright. Alexa now has 50,000 apps and hundreds of thousands of app developers in more than 180 countries, he said.

Alexa, after all, started out as a home device, and Amazon is ready to go even further. Amazon’s Alexa has only scratched the surface of the voice realm.

In the future, “you won’t need a manual, our device will learn from you, not the other way around.” Daniel said confidently.