Amazon doubles down on Alexa as Jeff Bezos says: 'There is much more to come'

There is a bright future ahead for Amazon Alexa, after company boss and occasional world's richest man Jeff Bezos teased there is "much more to come" for the smart home assistant.

Bezos spoke after Amazon delivered its 2017 fourth-quarter financial results, which included $1.9bn of profit for the quarter from $60.5bn of revenue.

Amazon does not reveal exactly how many of its own products it sells, something which has always made the popularity of Kindle, Fire and Echo devices difficult to quantify.

However, Bezos did say that Amazon sold "tens of millions" of Echo devices in 2017. Clearly upbeat about Alexa's performance to date and Amazon's future plans for the Echo range, Bezos added: "Our 2017 projections for Alexa were very optimistic, and we far exceeded them. We don't see positive surprises of this magnitude very often - expect us to double down."

Bezos went on: "We've reached an important point where other companies and developers are accelerating adoption of Alexa. There are now over 30,000 skills from outside developers, customers can control more than 4,000 smart home devices from 1,200 unique brands with Alexa, and we're seeing strong response to our new far-field voice kit for manufacturers. Much more to come and a huge thank you to our customers and partners."

Although Amazon's profits are still dominated by online commerce and Amazon Web Services, the company is putting more attention than ever on Alexa. This Sunday will see the virtual assistant star in a Super Bowl commercial with Bezos.

Having beat predictions, Amazon's strong results sent its share price up by five percent in after-hours trading.

And don't forget to check out The GearBrain to see what other connected devices work with Amazon Alexa enabled device.