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In addition to their market share in the smart speaker market, Google and Amazon are also competing for the developer spirit in the voice application ecosystem. In this regard, Amazon has grown: the number of voice skills available for Alexa devices has exceeded the 80,000 units recently announced by the company. According to a new third party badysis of Voicebot, Google would follow from a distance with its own voice applications, called Google Assistant Actions, which totaled 4,253 in the United States in January 2019.
In comparison, 56,750 of Amazon's 80,000 skills are available in the United States.
The report says that the number of Google badistant shares has been multiplied by 2.5 over the past year, representing slightly faster growth than that seen on Amazon Alexa, whose the number of skills increased 2.2 times over the same period. But the total is a much smaller number, so the percentages of growth may not be as relevant here.
As of January 2018, the total number of Google Assistant badistants in the United States was 1,719, says the report. In 2017, this number was a few hundred at the beginning of the year and reached 724 in October 2017.
Voicebot also examined which categories of voice applications were popular on Google Assistant platforms.
It turns out that three of the 18 categories represent more than a third of all Google Assistant actions: Education and Reference; Games and fun; and children and family.
The Education category dominated the list with more than 15% of all actions compared to 11.07% for Games & Fun and 9.29% for Kids & Family.
Local and Weather were the least popular.
On Alexa, the main categories differ slightly. Although Google Games & Fun is popular on Google, its equivalent of Alexa – Games & Trivia – is the most popular category, with 21% of total skills. Education was the second most popular with about 14%.
It is interesting to note that these two main voice application drivers are reversed on both platforms.
This could indicate that Alexa is considered the most "fun" or most family-oriented platform for games and games. Amazon has certainly become aware of the trend of vocal games and fanned the flames by making games the first category on which it was paying developers to work via direct payments. This has probably encouraged more developers to enter the space and has subsequently helped to increase the number of games – and types of gaming experiences – available for Alexa.
The Voicebot report rightly raises the question of whether the number of raw skills matters or not.
After all, many of today's Alexa skills are of poor quality, or even more experimental attempts by developers testing the platform. Others are just pretty basic: the voice application equivalent applications of third-party flashlight for iPhone before Apple has integrated this feature into iOS. For example, a handful of skills turns on the Echo speakers so you can have a night light with the blue speaker ring.
But even if these first efforts are sometimes in vain, Alexa is not what the developers of the platform think, because it is an indication of the commitment of the platform and an investment on the part of the developers . On the other hand, Google itself feeds much of the functionality of its wizard, relying heavily on its knowledge base to answer users' questions, while exploiting its ability to integrate it. as a result of Google's apps and services, as well as to its other platforms, like Android.
In the long run, Google Assistant may well challenge Alexa more by capitalizing on the geographic extensions, but for the moment, Alexa is ahead of the smart speakers and, it seems, on the content.
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