Google Assistant Has 500 Million Monthly Users, Way Ahead Of Amazon Alexa

On Tuesday, Google revealed the number of users of its virtual assistant. Despite being born later, Google Assistant has obtained 500 million monthly users.

This is the first time the search giant has officially released its user figures, giving us all a big picture of how broad its assistant covers. The Assistant’s number of users is half as large as that of Google’s other products, which include Chrome, Drive, and Maps. The company also said that the voice assistant is now available in 30 countries and supports 90 languages.

These numbers were announced by the tech giant itself at CES 2020 Las Vegas among other announcements. At CES 2019, Google made the announcement that Google Assistant made its way to 1 billion devices, though most of them are Android smartphones, on which the assistant is preinstalled.

It also seems that the Assistant has an advantage due to the popularity of the Android operating system. The more Android devices it’s built-in, the more people have the chance to use it. Android phones account for 90 percent of the total number of smartphones globally, which has a significant influence. At the event, Google also announced many new features of the assistant.

Amazon has not announced the number of monthly users of its voice assistant Alexa. On Monday, however, the company said at CES 2020 that Alexa has come to hundreds of millions of devices, a remarkable increase from 100 million devices a year ago. While there is a big difference between the monthly userbase of Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, it remains unclear how many of those actually want to have the Assistant in their houses as its figures rely on phones a lot.

Furthermore, Google is still behind Amazon in terms of the most common smart home item: smart speakers. Last year witnessed a steep decline in the company’s share on the smart speaker market, from 30 percent to 12 percent. meanwhile, Amazon experienced a 5% rise in its market share, from 32 percent to 37 percent.

Though the Assistant has broad coverage across the world, it mainly lives on smartphones. While Amazon has got Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana to work together, that collaboration hasn’t happened to Google Assistant. Though people can still have Google Assistant for the PC, they can only get the assistant in Windows 10 and the process is bothering. It appears that Google Assistant launcher can’t be achieved on lower Windows versions, so it’s impossible to install Google Assistant for PC Windows 7, and this operating system will soon be out of date anyway.