Alexa now works with 20,000 devices

• Posted on September 3, 2018
• by Ellsamwise King
• Comment

That large number comes courtesy of Amazon’s press event at IFA in Berlin this week. It’s an impressive jump, given that the company was only boasting around 4,000 the last time it reported a number at the beginning of the year.

“Just this year,” exec Daniel Rausch told the crowd, as reported by CNET. “Alexa has sung Happy Birthday millions of times to customers, and she’s told over 100 million jokes.”

That’s a lot jokes — at least one or two of them must have been good, right?

Alexa confirmed the number with TechCrunch, noting that Alexa works with “20k+ devices you can control with Alexa, from 3500+ brands.”

Amazon’s own devices only make up a small portion of the overall number, of course. There just aren’t that many Echo smart speakers, the Fire TV and Fire tablets. But the company has been making an extremely aggressive push to work with as many third-party devices as possible.

In many cases working closely with manufacturers on integration, both as partnerships and part of the company’s Alexa Fund, designed to invest in hardware startups. These days, the list of categories Alexa access is big and only getting bigger, from phones to thermostats to TVs to cars. At IFA this week, both Huawei and Netgear brought the assistant to home routers.

Google, too, has been pushing hard on manufacturers for third-party integration with its own offering — though it’s not hitting Alexa-type numbers just yet. In May, the company announced that 5,000 devices supported Assistant, up from 1,500 in January.

Source: Techcrunch