Amazon was definitely “late” to the digital assistant scene, choosing to launch Alexa years after companies like Apple, Google, and even Microsoft entered the fray. However it seems that despite being late, Alexa has quickly caught up thanks to Amazon’s launch of the Echo smart speakers and also making Alexa available to developers very early on in the game.
Now we think there might be a good reason behind why Alexa is dominating, at least compared to the likes of Siri. According to new data from Thinknum (via 9to5Mac), it seems that Amazon’s hiring for their Alexa team is at a rate of 5:1 compared to Apple’s hiring for Siri. This means that for every five people Amazon hires for Alexa, there is only one for Siri.
Searching for job openings with the term “Alexa” yielded about 750 jobs, versus Siri which has about 170. However it has been pointed out that the size of both companies are very different, with Amazon playing home to over 600,000 employees, versus the 80,000 or so at Apple, meaning that Apple might not have the need (or want to) hire at the same rate as Amazon does.
In any case regardless of that, it seems that Amazon’s hiring strategy could be paying off as Alexa is no doubt one of the frontrunners in the digital assistant market.