Purchases through Alexa this holiday season tripled year-over-year

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From Venture Beat:

Smart speakers, tablets, and set-top boxes with Amazon’s Alexa built in flew off the shelves this holiday season, according to Amazon.

The Seattle retailer didn’t break out exact stats, but revealed that shipments of Alexa-enabled devices like the Echo Dot, Fire TV Stick 4K, Alexa Voice Remote, and Echo were up “millions” of units year over year. Moreover, it said that Amazon shoppers purchased more Amazon’s Kids Edition devices — like the Echo Dots Kids Edition and Fire Kids Edition tablets — than ever before.

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Also in the millions? Sales of Amazon Fire TV, Fire Tablet, and Kindle products. Shipments of Ring- and Blink-branded first-party smart home security products didn’t quite hit those record heights, but they, along with the smart home device category broadly, were up from last year, Amazon said.

So how’d the proud new owners of Alexa-imbued tablets, set-top boxes, TVs, and tablets use their devices? To queue up music and switch on connected light bulbs, mostly. Alexa played “hundreds of millions” more jams this holiday than last across services including Amazon Music, Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music, among others, Amazon says. (The most popular holiday tune was Mariah Carey’s enduring pop single, “All I Want for Christmas Is You” — the same as last year.) And Alexa fielded “tens of millions” of requests to turn on holiday lights, with the number one command being “Alexa, turn on the Christmas tree.”

Link to the rest at Venture Beat