Alexa Now In More Than 100M Devices

Amazon’s senior vice president of devices and services Dave Limp told The Verge that more than 100 million devices with Alexa integrated into them have been sold so far.

According to a report in The Verge, Limp also said without providing more details that Amazon is sold out of Echo Dots through January — and that’s with the company “pushing pallets of Echo Dots onto 747s and getting them from Hong Kong to here as quickly as we possibly could.”

The impressive sales of Alexa devices can be viewed as a positive for Amazon or a negative, reported The Verge, noting that 100 million trumps the number of phones that Siri or Google Assistant have preinstalled. Still, the report noted that with the Alexa devices consumers chose to purchase Alexa as opposed to getting it preinstalled.

Either way, Limp doesn’t think a voice assistant platform war is emerging — and that if one does break out, it will look a lot different than previous platform wars.  “I don’t think it falls into a sporting event where there’s going to be one winner,” Limp said in an interview with The Verge. “There will be multiple players for the foreseeable future. I don’t think it’s only going to be only two, either. I think there will be more than that.”

What’s more, Limp said in the wide-ranging interview that he doesn’t think third-party Alexa devices will hurt the brand even though some of the 150 different products that have Alexa built in aren’t going to be the best of quality or smash hits.

“There are hits and misses,”  said the executive, noting that he doesn’t think consumers will blame Amazon for the less than stellar Alexa devices on the market. “As long as there are existence proofs in each of the categories,” consumers will figure it out. Amazon is also willing to let device makers support multiple assistants, as opposed to the platform wars of the past when manufactures inked exclusive agreements and balked at letting one platform work with rivals. Alexa works with Microsoft’s Cortana and Facebook’s Portal as two examples.  The executive noted he is even open to working with competitors to ensure the assistants work together so there is the same standard for identifying rooms, for one example. “We’re still a big believer in multiple assistants,” Limps says. “We think they will interact in lots of different ways.”