Over 10 billion interactions, of which half in 2021 alone, 450 million hours of music listened to and 28 million calls made: numbers in themselves significant and which become important if the paternity of the same belongs to a voice assistant. that of Amazon. Alexa today blows out her first three candles in Italy (in the US there are already seven), celebrates the anniversary by offering 4 months of free use of the Music Unlimited service to those who wish her a happy birthday through compatible devices and rightly snatches a smile from the country Italian manager, Gianmaria Visconti, ready to take the opportunity to rattle off other achievements achieved by Amazon’s artificial intelligence. Users, in these three years, have grown by 80% year on year and have “physically” adopted Alexa, so much so that asti for over 7 million times, in the last year alone, they have told her “I love you”.
Music and recipes among the catchphrases of 2021
According to the data released by the company, the nature of Alexa’s personal disk jokey remains a priority over the others and confirms how listening to music in liquid version through a smart speaker has become a habit for many Italians. In the last 12 months, in particular, over 280 million hours of streaming of songs and playlists have been used and among the most requested songs those loved by the very young stand out. Another feature exploited en masse was therefore the ability to set timers and alarms, requested about 500 million times in the last year alone in Italy, while to receive weather forecasts and listen to the news of the day, requests during 2021 exceeded , respectively, 95 and 21 million. Finally, there are also many cooking recipes consulted from January to today, more than 5 million, also thanks to the GialloZafferano Skill (spaghetti carbonara, tiramisu and pancakes with maple syrup the absolute favorite by users).
A global smart home of 140 thousand devices
BTicino, Fastweb and Philips Hue: these are just some of the brands that have developed and brought to the market smart devices compatible with Alexa. In the world there are more than 140 thousand including lights and lamps, electrical sockets, intercoms, Internet boxes to manage the ultra-fast connections of devices to the home network and cleaning robots while there are more than 200 million devices already connected to the voice assistant. by Amazon. In 2021 alone, in Italy, there were more than 1.2 billion interactions between smart devices and Alexa overall and over 100 thousand voice commands given by users per day to operate the BTicino home automation devices.
Skills and development for Alexa
In Italy today there are about 4,500 Skills created by Amazon together with third-party developers and about 550 of these are dedicated to the smart home. of the functions of Alexa, which in fact lends its intelligence even on board some cars (Maserati is one of these) to play music or even control compatible smart home devices, it is interesting to remember how Alexa has made substantial steps forward in fact of “performance”. As confirmed by Visconti, the fifty or so professionals (including language engineers and data scientists) at Amazon’s research and development center in Turin improved the assistant’s linguistic comprehension skills by around 70%. Nor should it be overlooked that the functionalities and skills accessible today in Italy are the result of the activity of a global developer community currently made up of over 54,000 members.
