Amazon says more than 100 million devices powered by its smart assistant Alexa have been sold.
The company has been avoiding the question for some years now, but whether sales have been going strong or not hasn't been a mystery. "Tens of millions of Echo devices" were sold in 2017, after all. Now there's just a solid number to go by.
Alexa Is Nearly Ubiquitous
Talking with The Verge, Amazon's senior vice president of devices and services Dave Limp said that over 100 million Alexa devices have been sold to date. However, he didn't exactly go into detail. He merely said that sales of the Echo Dot exceeded expectations during the holiday season and that the device is now sold out for January.
He didn't expand on the other devices either. In other words, he didn't reveal the number of, say, Echo Plus smart speakers sold. The sales figure took into account such partner devices with Alexa built in as the Sonos One and Bose Home Speaker 500. Put differently, they're devices that aren't made by Amazon.
In total, there are more than 150 devices that house Alexa, as well as over 28,000 smart home devices that are compatible with the smart assistant, The Verge says.
Alexa Is Going Strong
According to CNET, almost a million people have already signed up for invitations to purchase Echo Auto, which makes for a pretty good outlook for future sales of the company. It's an Alexa device that can be mounted on the dashboard that allows users to bring the smart assistant along their car rides. The news outlet also confirmed the 100-million sales figure that Limp revealed.
In other related news, a fake Alexa app, which claims to be an official setup companion, managed to climb up the iOS App Store charts. It reached the 60th spot in the Top Free section and even the 6th place in the Utilities category.
The appearance of a malicious app such as this isn't surprising at all. With the popularity of Alexa, there are more people susceptible to this kind of activity, and cybercriminals can take advantage of that.
