The Current State of Google Actions
Insights from deep beneath the surface
Everyone working in the world of voice applications knows one thing:
It is ridiculously hard to get insight in the voice app landscape.- How many Voice Apps exists in the world?
- What are the main categories that compete?
- And what is the spread over the different languages?
I decided to take dig deeper and get answers to these questions and more.
In this episode I will take you along to have a closer look at the voice apps for the Google Assistant: Google Actions.
Note: the data is from 1st April 2020 and comes from my personal research.
Total amount of Google actions
In total there are 33,299 Google actions, divided over 20 languages. These are all actions available in the Google Action Store, including 1st party skills from Google itself, as well as generated skills, based on websites. English is by far the biggest language, followed by Hindi.
The number of actions per language is as follows:
Voice or Screen-only?
Only 978 (3%) of the Google Actions indicate that they are not suitable for smart speakers, and thus are effectively screen-only. This means that 97% of all Google Actions ARE available on smart speakers. For me, this is a huge amount. There is a difference per language, but this can be explained by the relative low number of total actions for certain languages.
Categories
A Google Action can be placed only 1 out of 18 categories. So, what would be the biggest category? As expected, that is Games & Fun. With Education & Reference as a good second. But personally, I find it interesting that Smart Home is a steady number 3, leaving categories like News, Music and Productivity far behind.
A big word of caution here: The numbers presented above are the global numbers. Since the English market is so big, the numbers are heavily influenced by the English market. Seperate markets show very different results.
To show this, I like to put the Korean market next to it as a comparison. The category Games & Fun is not even in the top 3 now. However, Food & Drink together with Travel & Transport rule over the Korean action store.
Multilingual actions
There is more to say on the subject of languages. When you develop a Google Action, you can make it multilingual. This means a lot of extra work for the development, but it will also extend your reach into new parts of the world. There is quite a difference per language of the percentage that is multilingual.
One thing is clear: Much of the non-English language actions are including English as a second language. But many English actions don’t include a second language. There might be a big market to gain.
Conclusion
- Of the 20 available languages, English and Hindi are by far the biggest
- Only 3% of all the Google Actions are screen-only
- The ‘Games & Fun’ Category is more than 1/3th of the total market
- Distribution of Actions per category are very different per language
- There are many oppertunities by making your action multilingual
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And if you liked this article, you might want to check out my article about Growth Rate of Google Actions as well.
