Chapter 7. The Future of Voice-Based Personal Assistants

"Do or do not. There is no try."

– Master Yoda

We have completed six chapters, during which we have focused solely on Alexa. In this chapter, which is also the last chapter, we will still focus on Alexa and some of its most popular skills, but in comparison with its various competitors. We will also discuss the future of various voice-computing technologies available out there, including Alexa. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Popular Alexa Skills
• Comparing Various Voice-Based Assistants
• Future of Voice-Based Assistants

We are looking at these topics to consolidate the information that we have covered so far, and to brainstorm how the future of voice computing will look.

Popular Alexa Skills

At the time of writing, the total count of Alexa Skills available in the US, which is also the biggest market for Amazon Alexa, has surpassed 30,000, with an average of 50 new skills getting published each day. Each of these skills is available under a specific category, and the Alexa Skills Store is currently letting the developers and users choose from 23 different major categories, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 7.1: Alexa Skills – categorical distribution

At the time of writing (mid-2018), the most popular categories (the ones that have the most skills) among developers are:

• Games and Trivia: Hosts over 6,000 skills
• News: Hosts over 3,000 skills
• Music and Audio: Hosts over 3,000 skills
• Education and Reference: Hosts over 3,000 skills
• Lifestyle: Hosts over 2,000 skills

Among the top five, the distribution is as follows:

Figure 7.2: Alexa Skills – most popular categories

This should not come as a surprise, since these categories are equally as popular for smartphone...

Comparing Various Voice-Based Assistants

Although we have already discussed and compared various voice-based assistants to some extent in Chapter 1, What is Alexa?, in this section we will limit our discussion to voice-enabled speakers that host these assistants.

As of 2018, there are only a few major players in the voice-enabled speaker market (source: voicebot.ai), namely Amazon, which holds the lion's share of 52%, then Google Home, standing at 32%, Apple's HomePod at 12%, and the rest of the market is divided between several other players, as depicted in the following pie chart:

Figure 7.4: Alexa Skills – distribution of smart speaker market

We will cover three of the major players in this section; Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple HomePod.

Amazon Echo

Introduced in November 2014, the Echo series of smart speakers by Amazon had the first mover's advantage in the voice-computing market, which enabled it to grab the lion's share of 70% of the complete market. But that is not the only thing...

Future of Voice-Based Assistants

In the infancy of the smart speaker market in 2016, the total number of smart speaker units sold was less than 10 million, however, at the beginning of the latter half of 2017, Amazon Echo had sold more than 20 million devices alone (source: voicebot.ai) and it is predicted (source:voicebot.ai) that, during 2018, more than 56 million smart speaker devices will be sold:

Figure 7.7: Growth of smart speaker market

Also, by 2020, it is predicted (source: Gartner, Edison Research 2017) that 75% of US households will have a smart speaker:

Figure 7.8: Consumer adoption of smart speakers

The preceding statistics predict a market poised to grow exponentially and explode over the coming years. Also, the pitching in of Google and Apple with their own voice-computing devices only consolidates this fact.

No doubt, this is the best time to develop for voice since the technology, the hardware, and the documentation are both easily available and accessible.

Summary

With this, we are at the end of this chapter and the end of this book.

We hope you really enjoyed our time together and now have some solid confidence in your skills as an Alexa Skills Jedi.

Also, we hope that you have a good idea of what kinds of categories and skills are available in the Alexa Skills Store, why some of the skills do better than others, and which niche categories you can focus on when designing your next skill.

With all that information at hand, we cannot wait for you to publish your next skill. If you build something cool, drop us a line.