Google Assistant Action grows to Reach 4,253 in the US
By Tripti Rai
February 19, 2019 5 min read
Last update on: February 19, 2019

The world of voice assistants is seeing a new high for a couple of years. In competition with Amazon’s Alexa, Google is also taking actions.

The Google Assistant Action, earlier had slow growth in the past as compared to Amazon’s Alexa. And even now, Amazon is way ahead with a total of 80,000 available voice skills for Alexa devices.

But Google is soon catching up.

As of January 2019, Google Assistant Actions were recorded to be at 4,253 in the US. Even though there is a wide gap, it was said that the growth rate of Google Assistant Actions was 2.5 times faster in the year 2018.

56,750 of the voice skills of Alexa out of the 80,000 total are offered in the US alone. To reach this number Google will need more time and a faster speed of growth. The growth of 2.5X is much faster than that of Amazon’s Alexa which is 2.2X. But when it comes to the numbers then there is a huge gap and growth rate has less relevance here.

It was noted in January 2018 that Google Assistant Action had 1,710 voice skills in the US. Earlier in 2017, the numbers were in some hundreds at the beginning of the year and had reached 724 by October 2017.

According to Voicebot, Google Assistant has top apps 3 categories out of the 18 categories. These are Education and reference, Kids and Family and Games and Fun. The percentage distribution for action in each category was: Education at 15%, Games and Fun at 11.07% and Kids and Family at 9.29%.

On the other hand, Alexa’s top categories were different than Google Assistant. The Games and Fun category of Google Assistant is popular. But the same category named Games and Trivia in Alexa is in the first position. With 21% of the total skills, Games and Trivia was the number one category in the list. Education was at the second position with 14% of total skills.

All these percentages show that Amazon’s Alexa is seen as more of a fun part than anything else. The developers are using the platform to experiment with new apps which makes the skills of Alexa low quality.

Whereas Google is a preference when users want to learn something or gather information. This clearly shows that Google is trusted for the source of information it provides. All the skills of Google Assistant are powered by Google itself and depend largely on its Knowledge Base to answer users’ questions. Google Assistant app for businesses is another area in which Google has made progress.

The future of both the voice assistant technologies look bright and competing. Right now Google is in the lead with the quality of skills developed by them but Alexa is where developers are going. For mobile app developers, Alexa has become a platform to put forward their apps and see if it hits the top lists.

In the future, Google may be able to surpass Amazon with more voice skills. Recently Google launched its own Action SDK for Google Assistant app development for businesses that involve short direct conversations on a regular basis. Slowly Google is getting into different areas where voice assistants can be used and is forming its ground. With Google Home solutions in 38 countries, it has already made huge progress.

This was all about the latest Google Assistant growth update. Stay tuned for future updates or contact our Google Home experts for more details.

Tripti Rai
Tripti Rai
Content Manager
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