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Amazon's Alexa Passes 15,000 skills, Up From 10,000 in February (techcrunch.com)

Posted by msmash on from the craze-for-smart-speakers dept.

As more and more companies get into the smart speaker game, a new report shows just how much ground they have to make up to catch Amazon's digital assistant, Alexa. From a report: Amazon's Alexa voice platform has now passed 15,000 skills -- the voice-powered apps that run on devices like the Echo speaker, Echo Dot, newer Echo Show and others. The figure is up from the 10,000 skills Amazon officially announced back in February, which had then represented a 3x increase from September. The new 15,000 figure was first reported via third-party analysis from Voicebot, and Amazon has since confirmed the figure. According to Voicebot, which only analyzed skills in the U.S., the milestone was reached for the first time on June 30, 2017. During the month of June, new skill introductions increased by 23 percent, up from the less than 10 percent growth that was seen in each of the prior three months.

2 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Awesome. by mfh · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I get that you're joking but the erosion of our language to this pseudo-marketing language is devolving us completely as a species.

    No corporation can deny the meaning of common words.

    Skill is not the same as "number of apps interfacing with a hardware system," and this perversion of language continues to be tolerated.

    Corporations want this because it means they can make a word mean whatever will benefit them the most, either to limit their own culpability or to trigger a buying response.

    Amazon wants to take the word "skills" and apply it to "app-count" but if this was truly an amazing product, it would work on every app and not require special coding just to get it to work.

    --
    The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
  2. Re:Awesome. by mfh · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Really interesting choice of words since Apple decided that they can 'make a word mean whatever will benefit them the most' when they changed 'app' from being an appearance in a sport to 'software interfacing with a hardware system.' In riling against the practice you subtly reinforce it. Bravo!

    Slow down cowboy!

    App is short for application. Apps is the plural. You got this wrong totally. If Apple uses the term APPS, they are merely using the general term with the happy coincidence that it includes the first three letters of their company name.

    How many of you remember WAREZ APPS? Apple wasn't even a thing back then for most of us. :D

    --
    The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.