80,000 Skills

The latest numbers are 80,000 Skills. Me with grampa voice: “I remember when there were only 300 Skills… and you used to have a to walk two miles in the snow to get to school.” This current number of Skills is certainly an achievement and it came with a huge push by the Amazon team to grow the number of developers.

Ultimately, most of these Skills will get no users and a few will be ultra popular and account for most of the Skill interactions. We’ll likely see 100,000+ by July and then a doubling every year after that. At some point, invocations will disappear and all of the abilities of the Skills will seem native to Alexa.

Gadget Skills will start to become more prevalent, we’ll see more hardware integrations, and maybe some local / offline capabilities for Alexa. The pool of prize money for developers will go up and Alexa Skills designed just for TV or screen interfaces might flourish. This is speculation based on what’s available today but with the team Amazon has in place to support Skill developers, it’s likely we’re far from done in Skill innovation.