Google Assistant Is Closing the Skills Gap, But Alexa Still Dominates

One of the most consistent bets at Google I/O is that we'll learn how Google Assistant has gotten smarter over the past year: the new tricks it's learned, the new features it has, and the new devices and form factors on which it's living. The annual developer conference is also a good straw poll of how the intelligent assistant's third-party ecosystem is growing.

Voice-activated assistants such as Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant, and Siri each has an expanding stable of the various tasks they can perform. Amazon calls them skills, and Google calls them actions, but ultimately, they all mean the same thing.

According to a report from Voicebot.ai, the number of actions available for Google Assistant more than doubled in 2018, ballooning from 1,719 in January 2018 to 4,253 in January 2019. It's a big jump compared with the incremental improvements we saw after the company announced Actions on Google in late 2016.

But Google Assistant's expanded catalog still pales in comparison to Alexa's. Voicebot.ai found that Alexa had a whopping 56,750 available actions in January 2019, showing only slightly slower 2.2x growth over the past year compared with Google's 2.5x growth. Alexa's skills library is vast, and despite Google's ecosystem growth, it's playing catch-up but still far behind.

Both Alexa and Google Assistant's actions/skills numbers are inflated by duplicate skills, but they're a good indication of developer activity around the voice assistants. Check out the full Voicebot.ai report for deeper breakdowns on the app categories in which Google Assistant has seen the most skills growth.

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