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Alexa, how are Amazon’s devices doing? Assessing the company’s big hardware unveiling, a year later

One year ago, in a splashy press event at its Seattle headquarters, Amazon unveiled more than a dozen new devices, putting Alexa into everything from microwaves to sound systems to car dashboards. It was an unprecedented wave of new products, designed to push the company’s voice assistant into more corners of the home and, increasingly, out into the rest of the world.

With the company expected to hold a new event later this week, it’s the right time to ask: what happened to all that stuff from last year?

At the time, it seemed like a lot to take on, and some of the products had hiccups out of the gate. Amazon temporarily pulled the Echo Wall Clock, and the Alexa microwave received mixed reviews — promptly getting exiled from GeekWire’s own test kitchen.

But in the year since the event, Amazon has followed through and released all but one of the devices widely to the public. The only outlier in the bunch is Echo Auto, a $50 device that connects to the Alexa smartphone app and plays through car speakers.

Why is Amazon putting so much time and effort into expanding its catalog of smart speakers and building so many new gadgets to work with them? Research Nester estimates that the global smart speaker market will be a $34.4 billion business by 2027. It was just a $4.3 billion market in 2017, per a report from Allied Research Partners.