Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa is getting more skillful by the day.
The brain behind Amazon’s Echo speakers has topped 7,000 skills, Amazon’s vice president of Echo, Alexa and app store Mike George said during a joint announcement of an Alexa-enabled refrigerator with LG at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Wednesday.
“We now today have over 7,000 custom skills that third party developers have built to enhance Alexa,” George said. “And we have a rich pipeline of Alexa voice service equipment that will be released over the coming months.”
Amazon occasionally releases figures for how many skills, the voice equivalent of apps, Alexa has, and these disclosures show just how fast she is adding new capabilities. In September, Amazon said Alexa had surpassed 3,000 skills, triple the number available in June. Then in December, George told GeekWire that Alexa was up to 5,400 skills.
Alexa’s skills include things like the ability to schedule a ride from Lyft, get a pizza delivered, find a lost phone or hear from former Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch. One of the newest skills helps sports fans skip the cable guide and find out when their team is playing.
Alexa has already made a big impact at CES this week, with more to come. Already, LG has announced the Alexa-enabled refrigerator, Lenovo debuted a voice-activated speaker that runs on Alexa and Dish Network customers will soon be able to pair a Hopper DVR with an Alexa-powered speaker and control it using their voices.
Alexa’s proliferation can be partially attributed to the company’s decision to open the digital brain up to developers and device manufacturers in 2015. Alexa Voice Service lets manufacturers integrate Alexa into their products. The Alexa Skills Kit encourages third-party developers to build skills for Alexa. Developers who want to add to Alexa’s abilities can write code that works with Alexa in the cloud, letting the smart assistant do the heavy lifting of understanding and deciphering spoken commands.
