Voice Assistant Timeline: Chronicling a Revolution from 1961-2019

Today we launch the third annual edition of our Voice Assistant Timeline. We created the timeline in 2017 to highlight significant moments in the voice revolution especially as it began to evolve rapidly with the release of the Amazon Echo over four years ago. It is getting harder to select the significant breakthroughs in the voice industry as they occur regularly and some items that seemed important at the time have been removed to make way for other milestones. For instance, Google and Amazon’s rapid global expansion into new smart speaker markets or Amazon passing yet another skill total milestone.

Our last update was March 2018 and we’ve added over 35 moments since, including the launch of Google Duplex, Apple introducing voice activated AirPods and Amazon releasing its Alexa Auto SDK. These developments are just a few highlights of the past year and show how rapidly voice is being adopted by consumers, businesses and manufacturers globally – Amazon Alexa now supports over 60,000 devices and Google Assistant 30,000. But that’s just one of the many highlights in the new timeline. As always, let us know what you think on Twitter.

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Amazon Alexa Skill Growth Declines Worldwide in the First Half of 2019, But Alexa Skills Pass 60k in U.S. and 30k in U.K.

A Timeline of Voice Assistant and Smart Speaker Technology From 1961 to Today