XAPPMedia

Jun 11, 2018

Registration on or use of this site constitutes acceptance of our This story was delivered to Business Insider Intelligence Apps and Platforms Briefing subscribers hours before appearing on Business Insider. To be the first to know, please click here . XAPPmedia, a leader in interactive voice engagement for media and brands, announced last week that it has launched over 1,000 paid voice apps on its One Voice AI platform in the last year. XAPPmedia's platform is designed to simultaneously publish voice apps for consumer brands and media companies that operate on Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. XAPPMedia is listed as one of the 38 agencies on Alexa's US agency listing for skill development, and one of the 20 agencies listed for creating Google Assistant actions. Growth in the number of voice apps launched is important because consumers are warming up to using voice assistants for a wide range of activities. But their usage will become constrained if brands do not embrace this growing desire and readily adopt voice apps. Some of the major companies that have launched apps via XAPPmedia include Westwood One, Scripps, National Geographic, and Progressive Insurance. BI Intelligence Amazon's Alexa platform is the most preferred by consumer brands and media companies based on XAPPmedia's paid voice app launches. While the One Voice AI platform is able to publish simultaneously to both voice assistants, 95% of voice apps published to Alexa's platform, and only 5% published to Google Assistant's. This reflects the dominance of available Amazon voice apps within the voice assistant ecosystem, as Alexa counts 40,000 skills and the Assistant counts 2,400 voice apps. The strong preference for the Alexa platform highlights how Amazon's efforts to entice brands and developers to create content for the Alexa platform are paying off. Amazon's addition of monetization tools for Alexa skills likely helps Amazon draw voice apps developers from competing platforms. For instance, in October 2017, Amazon announced that skills developers could create subscription models for their Alexa skills, and in November 2017, Amazon introduced one-time in-skill purchases. On the other hand, Google currently offers no direct monetization options for action developers. XAPPmedia also highlighted that consumers are engaged with the voice apps launched on its One Voice AI platform. Total user sessions of voice apps reached more than 8 million. There's also an average of 7,900 user sessions per voice app. However, this may not be fully reflective of user sessions considering over 30% of the 1,012 paid voice apps were launched in the last five months and haven't built up their audience yet. Further, XAPPmedia noted that various Alexa skills have already generated hundreds of thousands of sessions.