Alexa Skills Officially Pass 40,000 in US and 1,500 in Japan

On September 23rd, Amazon’s Alexa skill count in the U.S. quietly passed 40,000. We say quietly because there is no longer fanfare associated with this type of Amazon Alexa skill milestone. This was even true when Germany passed 5,000 Alexa skills (earlier this month) and the UK 20,000 (earlier this year).

Amazon has adopted the practice of announcing unique skill counts worldwide and not revealing country-by-country statistics. That approach resulted in Amazon announcing that there were more than 50,000 Alexa skills worldwide at the end of August. In reality, no Alexa user actually had access to 50,000 skills. The U.S. has the largest Alexa skill store and at the time there were fewer than 39,000 Alexa skills. Today, U.S. users have access to over 40,000 and the number has actually risen by about 1,400 new skills over the past 30 days.

This means that U.S. Alexa users have a lot of choices of third-party skills and increasingly this is also true outside of the U.S. And, these skills complement the growing list of first-party skills and capabilities that are native to Alexa. There is no dearth of voice apps for users to explore.

Only 15,000 Skills Have Ratings

Of course, there are many Alexa skills that are never used. A review of Dashbot.io data today show that only 15,552 Alexa skills have ratings. Given the actual skill count today of 40,210 (this has risen by about 200 new skills over the past four days), reveals 61% have zero ratings. This doesn’t necessarily mean these skills are never used, but most of them are long forgotten. By the way, data from September 2017 showed that 62% of Alexa skills had no ratings. At that time, there were about 20,000 Alexa skills in the U.S. The total Alexa skill count has doubled in 385 days but the ratio of Alexa skills with at least one user rating remained roughly the same at just under 40%.

Japan Moves Past 1,500 Alexa Skills

Voicebot started reporting Alexa skill counts for Japan earlier this month when we reported 1,371. That number rose 10% in less than one month to 1,509. This is a healthy growth rate for Alexa skills and bodes well for the more than 5% of Japanese adults with access to an Amazon Echo smart speaker.

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Amazon Alexa Now Has 50,000 Skills Worldwide, works with 20,000 Devices, Used by 3,500 Brands

76 Percent of New Alexa Skills Arrive in U.S., Germany Passes 5,000 Skills, Japan Over 1,000