Amazon’s Alexa Facilitates Billions of Dollars of Transactions

(Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc. said large amounts of money are changing hands annually on its Alexa voice-assistant platform, bolstering the business case for companies and developers to focus their attention on a platform not known for churning off cash.

“There are now billions of dollars flowing through the Alexa flywheel every year,” Dave Limp, the leader of Amazon’s devices and services business, said at a press event in Seattle. That total excludes the cash Amazon receives for sales of its own services, Limp said.

Amazon also gave updated statistics on the health of the ecosystem growing up around Alexa. Alexa’s domain now includes some 85,000 compatible products built by other companies, and some 100,000 skills. Still, that marketplace has yet to find a transformational hit outside of basic tasks, despite drawing widespread interest.

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