Amazon Alexa Skills Surpass 5000

It was just September that Amazon announced there were over 3,000 Alexa skills. That was significant because just a year earlier the Alexa API was announced and there were only 14 skills for users to access. In an article yesterday, The Information reported (N.B. paywall) that Amazon now acknowledged having over 5,000 Alexa skills. So, Voicebot decided to investigate.

An 8.15% Compound Weekly Growth Rate

As of this morning, we looked at data from Amazon that showed there are 5,191 Alexa skills that have been certified. This is exactly seven weeks since the 3,000 skill mark was announced so we know that developers are adding over 1,000 Alexa skills per month. In fact, this works out to be an 8.15% compound weekly growth rate. If this rates persists, Alexa users can expect there to be over 10,000 skills to choose from in just under nine weeks. That will be the week of January 16, 2017. By the end of the month that total would grow to over 12,000. You may recall that there were only 130 Alexa skills available in January of 2016. We may be looking at a nearly 100 times increase in just one year.