Alexa is fast becoming entrenched in our personal & professional lives

Amazon Alexa growth

HeikoAL / Pixabay

Amazon’s digital voice assistant Alexa is now to be found on 20K devices, according to the company. And the march of Alexa is not about to stop anytime in the future, going by the promise Amazon has made. Truly, say experts, Amazon Alexa’s growth has been very impressive.

A report in CNET said Amazon executive Daniel Rausch stood before a crowd at Berlin’s IFA tech show on Saturday to share a few big numbers about Alexa. So hold your breath – at the beginning of the year, Alexa was only on 4,000 devices. Rausch, Amazon’s Vice-president of smart home, said that Alexa was now integrated with over 20,000 devices — a 5-fold increase in a mere 8 months. The number of brands using Alexa shot up to over 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 & Yale’s Sync home alarm system.

If you just said, “whew”, wait. There’s more coming. Amazon apparently has no intention of halting. The e-commerce giant is already integrating Alexa into cars, office spaces & hotels, building on its vision of making Alexa available everywhere you are. That work is already introducing the new world of voice computing to millions more people. Going forward, the day is not far off when you will have an intelligent, digital assistant with you at all times to help you get through your day & even chat with you if you want.

Just a few weeks ago, Amazon’s Alexa & Microsoft’s Cortana had initiated the next step in a collaboration announced last fall. US customers who are interested in early access to the collaboration will be able to summon Cortana on Echo devices & enable Alexa on their Windows 10 PCs & Harman Kardon Invoke speakers, said Microsoft.

As part of a public preview releasing this week, they also can offer feedback on how to improve the experience.

The goal is to have 2 integrated digital voice assistants who can carry out tasks across different dimensions of daily life — at home or work, & on whatever device is most convenient. Currently, Cortana & Alexa can each be enabled as a skill on the other.


 

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