Amazon’s Alexa voice platform has now passed 15,000 skills — the voice-powered apps that run on devices like the Echo speaker, Echo Dot, newer Echo Show and others. The figure is up from the 10,000 skills Amazon officially announced[1] back in February, which had then represented a 3x increase from September.
The new 15,000 figure was first reported[2] via third-party analysis from Voicebot, and Amazon has now confirmed to TechCrunch that the number is accurate.
According to Voicebot, which only analyzed skills in the U.S., the milestone was reached for the first time on June 30, 2017. During the month of June, new skill introductions increased by 23 percent, up from the less than 10 percent growth that was seen in each of the prior three months.
The milestone also represents a more than doubling of the number of skills that were available at the beginning of the year, when Voicebot reported[3] there were then 7,000 skills. That number was officially [4]confirmed by Amazon at CES.
Voicebot also noted that Flash Briefings are still one of the most popular categories of skills, in terms of those that are live on the Alexa Skill Store today. These news and information-focused voice apps include those from major media publications like The Wall St. Journal, NPR, Washington Post (ahem[5], TechCrunch[6]), and others.
Because they’re one of the easiest skills to develop, Flash Briefings have grown to account for around 20 percent of the available skills. You can see this figure for yourself here on the Alexa Skills store[7], which indicates there are 2,891 “news” skills live now.
The number of available skills is an...