Amazon's Alexa assistant now works with over 20K devices

Amazon executive Daniel Rausch stood onstage before a crowd of hundreds at Berlin's IFA tech show Saturday to share a few big numbers about Alexa."Just this year," he said, "Alexa has sung Happy Birthday millions of times to customers, and she's told over 100 million jokes."Maybe Alexa, Amazon's voice assistant, hasn't sung Happy Birthday to you just yet, but -- considering the way things are going -- there's a good chance it'll get invited to your next birthday celebration.At the start of this year, Alexa worked with over 4,000 devices. Rausch, Amazon's vice president of smart home, said Saturday that Alexa is now integrated with over 20,000 devices -- a fivefold increase in just eight months. The number of brands using Alexa shot up to over 3,500 from 1,200 during the same time.Highlighting that growth, IFA brought with it a slew of new Alexa-powered devices, including the Huawei AI Cube smart speaker, Asus ZenBook laptops and Yale's Sync home alarm system.