Amazon Says Over 100 Million Alexa Devices Have Been Sold to Date

Over 100 million Alexa-enabled devices have been shipped to date, Amazon has announced. The e-commerce giant is known for withholding numbers regarding all its hardware and services, which makes this a unique — and possibly deliberate, with CES 2019 around the corner — reveal. Of course, Amazon didn't get into any specifics, which is to be expected, so there's no percentage split on how many of those 100 million are Amazon-made Echo devices, and third-party ones such as the Bose QC 35 II.

In an interview with The Verge, Amazon's SVP of Devices & Services Dave Limp said that there are now over 100 million devices with Alexa on-board out in the world. The report claims that number can be seen one of two ways: it's a lot or it's nothing compared to the billions of devices that have Google Assistant or Siri on them. Though The Verge believes the differentiation lies in that it's “pre-installed” in terms of the latter, there are plenty of Alexa-enabled devices that are something else first primarily — be it a headphone, a TV, or a robot vacuum — and a digital assistant second.

There are a few other interesting numbers here. Amazon says there are more than 150 products that offer Alexa built in, with over 4,500 companies responsible for an astounding 28,000 smart home peripherals. The number of Alexa skills? 70,000. Google's last numbers update was at the Pixel 3 event in October, where it said that Google Assistant works with 10,000 smart devices from 1,000 brands.

Since the release of the first-gen Echo in 2014, Amazon has been gung-ho on the voice-based digital assistant market, having itself created the much smaller Echo Dot, the portable Amazon Tap, the built-in camera Echo Look, the built-in display Echo Show, the built-in circular display Echo Spot, the much bigger Echo Plus, the one-for-cars Echo Auto, the input-only Echo Input, the high-end audio version Echo Link and Link Amp, the subwoofer Echo Sub, and the clock-based Echo Wall Clock. Not all of them are available in India.