Google announced a major milestone for Google Assistant today.

The company expects Assistant to be available on one billion devices by the end of this month. With a bunch of new products coming out at CES with Google Assistant, that might be an easy reach for Google. The company has been making rapid improvements to Assistant over the last year, with new integrations coming out almost every month. And with Google continuing to bring Assistant to new types of devices, that’s unlikely to slow down anytime soon. That 1 billion number is still much larger than Amazon’s Alexa, but most of Google’s devices are Android devices, so it kind of makes sense at the end of the day.

Google says Assistant’s number of active users grew 4x over the last year, which is really massive if you think about it. It’s obviously unclear exactly how many active users Google Assistant had in the past, so it is difficult to understand the exact degree of growth here. The company said Assistant is now compatible with over 10,000 smart home devices from over 1,600 brands, up from the 5,000 devices from May 2018. That’s still significantly lower than Amazon’s 28,000 Alexa-compatible smart home devices.

On the hardware side of things, Google says it had another record year for Google Home devices over the holiday season in terms of sales. The company apparently sold millions of Google Home devices over the holidays, with smart displays being the main standout. In fact, Google says one out of every seven Google Home devices that were activated over the holidays was a Google Home Hub.

Google Assistant has come a long way over the last year, so the growth is kind of well-deserved.

Tagged with CES 2019, Google Assistant, Google Home