According to data obtained by voicebot.ai, Amazon’s recent announcement that Alexa had a total of 50,000 available skills amounted to nearly 40,000 of those being available in or based in the United States, with Japan being the smallest market at fewer than 2,000 skills. The UK has close to 23,000 available, and Germany has right around 5,000, according to data from the end of August. The chart, in total, accounts for 67,781 skills. With the United States having 38,790 of those available, this means that close to 57-percent of all Alexa Skills are available stateside.
Speaking strictly to Skill growth, the data indicated that there were roughly 82 new Skills being added per day during the rise from 40,000 Skills to 50,000. This counts not only entirely new Skills, but also Skills being ported to other languages and regions. In any case, the United States was found to be getting around 62 new Skills per day, making up 76-percent of that growth. On a longer, 9-month growth track, however, that sinks to an average of 53 new Skills per day. This is nearly matched by the UK average during that period of 52 per day. This can only mean that something happened in those latter 3 months of tracking to cause an explosion of Skill growth in the United States. Japan and Germany, meanwhile, only added an average of 4.1 and 8.6 new Skills per day during that period, respectively.
The fact that Amazon is headquartered in the United States alongside a large number of tech companies that would have a reasonable interest in creating Skills for Alexa is one possible reason that the US is such a hotbed for Skill growth. The jump in the US average Skill growth reflected in the period between 40,000 and 50,000 Skills is not a new thing, judging by the gulf between the US and its closest competitor in that field, the UK. Amazon’s developer advocacy efforts run worldwide, but many of them that are more hands-on will naturally take place closer to home. Going forward, there is no reason to suspect that this pattern will see any major shifts, though availability and ease of both cross-language development tools and developer-facing features will likely continue to grow, causing expansion across the board, including markets that are currently outliers. In Japan’s case, Alexa has only been on the market for 11 months, which means that many would-be local Skill developers may not have had a chance to get their creations off the ground yet. In any case, it can’t be denied that Alexa is gaining serious momentum as an ecosystem worldwide.
