Amazon hasn’t (and probably won’t for a long time) disclosed how many Echos, Dots or Taps it has sold, but it’s clear these products (of which the Echo was the first, with the Dot and Tap coming earlier this year) have been an unintended boon for Amazon and its artificial intelligence/machine learning initiatives, as well as providing a nice boost in hardware revenues.
It’s clear that developers are also taking notice of the platform, something that helps bring in more users as it gets more features: there are now more than 1,400 skills for Alexa, up from 1,000 earlier in June. That’s a pretty explosive growth rate, even if it is a small base.
