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Alexa, who is No. 15 on the Recode 100 list?
That would be Amazon executives Toni Reid and Rohit Prasad, the duo in charge of the company’s popular voice-controlled assistant and in-home devices. Reid, a near 20-year Amazon veteran, oversees the Alexa experience and devices, like the Amazon Echo, while Prasad handles the speech and machine learning aspects of Alexa herself.
It’s been an impressive run. Alexa has become a household name in an increasingly competitive market for smart assistants and in-home speakers. In 2017, Amazon rolled out five new Alexa-powered devices for the home, and Alexa can now complete more than 15,000 different skills. (The device originally launched with 13, Reid says.) The result has been total domination of the nascent market. Some estimates peg Amazon’s marketshare for smart home speakers at 76 percent.
If you believe in a future that includes a connected home — or if you believe that search will eventually be dominated by voice commands instead of typing into a Google search bar — you’ll have Reid and Prasad to thank for getting the industry rolling.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
