Amazon's smart assistant Alexa now has 10,000 skills

Growing by leaps and bounds, Amazon Alexa now has 10,000 "skills".

Since hitting the market in June 2015, Amazon’s voice-controlled assistant had about 1,000 skills in June, 5,000 by December and more than 10,000 as of now, the tech giant has announced.

"Today we’re happy to share that developers have published over 10,000 skills, making Alexa even better for customers. We’ve been blown away by the innovation and activity in the Alexa developer community," wrote David Isbitski, Chief Evangelist, Alexa and Echo - ‎Amazon in a blog post. "To put it in perspective, we’ve seen a 3x increase in the number of skills available since September 2016 alone."

Amazon's Alexa platform is a smart software that allows users to give voice commands and questions to the device. Its skills include retrieving your latest bank account information to ordering an Uber, tracking a pizza delivery, dimming the lights or reordering your drink.

The 10,000th Alexa skill is the “name that tune” trivia game, Beat the Intro, which you can trigger by saying, “Alexa, enable Beat the Intro.”

"At Amazon, we believe that there will be an Alexa skill for everyone, for everything,” said Isbitski.

The latest achievement is definitely a milestone for Amazon, but the real question is how many people actually use these skills? According to a 2017 Voice Report from VoiceLab, only 3 percent of Alexa skills get repeat visitors.

That isn't too encouraging Amazon!