The Canadian marketplace is largely similar to the USA, only much smaller. Unique to this market is that skills can be in French or English. While it doesn’t affect most skills because it’s possible to translate the text spoken by the skill, it creates an opportunity for a francophone Flash Briefings. Take a look at the tables below to better understand what is popular and unique about the Canadian Amazon Alexa marketplace.
Explore the data:
Data at a glance*
Date: June 4th, 2020
# skills: 21 104
# flash briefings: 560
*these numbers may not represent all skills on this marketplace
Top skills
The top skills (per most ratings) on the Canadian marketplace are similar to most other locales. Fart skills and other simple sounds are on top. One of the most interesting aspects of these top skills is the general lack of reviews. The three skills with the most reviews are sound skills, something that is very common for this type of skill (see in-depth analysis). It’s unclear what this means in terms of customer behaviour, but it could suggest that users primarily use the voice interface to interact with Alexa instead of the app or the website. It is also worth noting that some of the most highly rated skills have a rating below 4 stars, which suggests that while they aren’t particularly well-liked, they are activated by Alexa without the user specifically asking for that skill. For example, users could say something along the lines of “Alexa, sing happy birthday” and Alexa launches The Birthday Song skill. Unfortunately, this skill doesn’t seem to work particularly well, so people give it a poor rating.
| Icon | Skill | Developer | Invocation | Description | Rating | Rating count | Review count |
|---|
Only in Canada
The Canadian market has the particularity that there are French (fr-CA) and English (en-CA) skills. The fr-CA skills are significantly less popular than their English counterparts and a large portion of these skills are for Canadian radio stations. It’s notable that only one French radio station (Rouge) seems to have a strong presence. This could be an opportunity for a developer (or radio station).
It’s also interesting that besides Trivia Hero from the excellent Labworks.io, the skills that are only in this market are generally not very well rated.
| Icon | Skill | Developer | Invocation | Description | Rating | Rating count | Review count |
|---|
Flash Briefings
Voice in Canada being on top of this list should not surprise anyone (listen to the episode where I talk about Voice Market Data). While Canada does not have nearly as many Flash Briefings as the USA, with the notable exception of NRP, most of the big names are present. Most notable is that there are significantly less fr-CA Flash Briefings than en-CA, and these are not nearly as popular as their English counterparts. There might be space for a French “Dr. Teri Fisher” to take over the Francophone Flash Briefing space (at least in Canada).
| Icon | Skill | Developer | Description | Rating count | Rating | Review count | Random review |
|---|
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