Purchases trough Alexa tripled this holiday season
Although Alexa might have taken a break during Christmas, when servers were overwhelmed by an influx of new devices, the voice assistant's popularity is ever-growing. This holiday season, she not only played Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas is You on repeat, but online purchases through Alexa tripled.
Business is booming for Amazon as usual. It has been another record-breaking holiday season for the e-commerce giant. The company announced that more items than ever have been ordered online, including Amazon's own products: best-selling among them are the "Echo Dot, Fire TV Stick 4K with all-new Alexa Voice Remote, and Echo".
Although the exact numbers haven't been revealed, the press release states millions more Amazon devices were sold this year. Sales of products aimed at kids also broke records - with customers purchasing more Echo Dot Kids Edition and Fire Kids Edition tablets than ever before.
Smart home tech, in general, is picking up momentum. The most popular choices on Amazon were the Ring Video Doorbell 2, TP-Link Kasa Smart Plug Mini Outlet, and the iRobot Roomba 690.
According to Amazon, Alexa was also utilized for a multitude of tasks this holiday season. Unsurprisingly, one of the most common requests was for recipes and cooking-related advice. Users took advantage of this feature three times as much, compared to last holiday season.
The voice assistant also set and delivered eight times as many reminders this Christmas; she helped mix eggnog and festive cocktails and of course - turned on the holiday lights "tens of millions of times". "Alexa, turn on the Christmas tree" was the number one request the assistant received.
Finally, Amazon customers used Alexa to listen to hundreds of millions more hours of music, with All I Want for Christmas is You by Mariah Carey being the most requested song. Amazon Storytime also saw a rise in popularity.
Looking at these numbers, it's not hard to conclude that despite privacy concerns and online backlash, voice assistants and smart speakers are here to stay. Currently, in the US, around 18% of adults, or around 50 million people own a smart speaker, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. This number is only predicted to grow, and we expect Amazon devices to be responsible for a large share of it.
What do you think? Are you surprised by the popularity of Amazon's Alexa? Do you own a smart speaker yourself? Let us know in the comments below.
Source: Amazon, Venture Beat
