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posted by martyb on Monday January 07 2019, @11:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the Siri-ous-Alexa-competitor dept.

Google Assistant will soon be on a billion devices, and feature phones are next

As CES kicks off, Google has a massive presence: monorails, a booth that's three times larger than last year, and likely a giant pile of news to announce. But ahead of all the actual product news, the company wants to beat its chest a little by announcing some numbers. By the end of the month, it expects that Google Assistant will be on 1 billion devices — up from 500 million this past May.

That's 900 million more than the number Amazon just gave us for Alexa. But just like Amazon, Google's number comes with caveats. In an interview with The Verge, Manuel Bronstein, the company's vice president of Google Assistant, copped to it. "The largest footprint right now is on phones. On Android devices, we have a very very large footprint," he says. He characterizes the ratio of phones as "the vast majority" of that billion number, but he won't specify it more than that. Though he does argue that smart speakers and other connected home devices comprise a notable and growing portion.

[...] For Google, the next billion devices will come in emerging markets, specifically on feature phones.


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  • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @11:19PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @11:19PM (#783447)

    I'm confused, is that really up? 500 Million sounds so much bigger...

    https://xkcd.com/2091/ [xkcd.com]

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 08 2019, @01:04AM (1 child)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 08 2019, @01:04AM (#783495) Journal
    I think it's worse than that. A lot of people don't differentiate between million, billion, and trillion in isolation. Sure, as the graph notes, if there's a billion versus a million, they know the former is bigger. But when there isn't such a side by side comparison it's all illions, which are big.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 08 2019, @09:39AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 08 2019, @09:39AM (#783602)

      Even worse, some use short scale and some use long scale values. Looking at wikipedia, it seems a almost a tie between pure long scale and pure short scale (just looking at the map, did not count the countries or population), but then there's a lot that use a mix, some use both and few that use another system.