Amazon on Thursday crushed earnings, posting impressive revenue growth and promising more big revenue growth to come next quarter.
- One thing that's hard to overstate is the pace at which Amazon is adding new products and services.
- Bezos underscored this by spelling out the work done for its voice-controlled Alexa devices in just one month.
- If you want to get a sense of just how Amazon dominates the voice-controlled device market, take a look at how CEO -
- Jeff Bezos characterized just one month of work on Alexa:
"In the last month alone, we've launched five new Alexa-enabled devices, introduced Alexa in India, announced integration with BMW, surpassed 25,000 skills, integrated Alexa with Sonos speakers, taught Alexa to distinguish between two voices, and more. Because Alexa's brain is in the AWS cloud, her new abilities are available to all Echo customers, not just those who buy a new device," he said.
And the pace won't quit anytime soon. There are now "thousands of developers and hardware makers building new Alexa skills and devices," he said.
Bezos believes this breakneck speed of innovation is "working," he said. While Amazon doesn't release Alexa sales data, he said, "Customers have purchased tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices, given Echo devices over 100,000 5-star reviews, and active customers are up more than 5x since the same time last year."
Even Microsoft, which has a well-equipped voice system of its own in Cortana, had to bow down to the power that Alexa has become.
Earlier this quarter, Microsoft and Amazon announced a partnership that will allow Alexa and Cortana to talk to each for things like accessing work calendars, booking a meeting, reading work email and, most importantly to Amazon, shopping on Amazon.com.