Amazon.com Inc.’s Alexa everywhere strategy is paying off. The company said Saturday that its smart assistant now works with more than 20,000 different devices.

Daniel Rausch, vice president of Amazon’s Smart Home group, revealed the number to an audience at the IFA tech show in Berlin Saturday along with a number of other insights into just how well the strategy has been working.

Just this year, Rausch is reported as saying, “Alexa has sung Happy Birthday millions of times to customers, and she’s told over 100 million jokes.”

Rausch said that Alexa-enabled devices have grown from working with an already impressive 4,000 devices at the beginning of the year to more than 20,000 devices while at the same time brands working with Alexa nearly tripled, from 1,200 to 3,500.

Although Alexa is best-known through Amazon’s own Echo range of smart speakers and Fire devices, Alexa’s spread is far wider. The rule of thumb for Amazon’s Alexa expansion apparently is that if a device has a central processing unit chip, it can support voice commands. Starting with Amazon devices, Alexa has expanded in smart TVs, mobile phones, washing machines, DVRs and laptops and has also started appearing in hotels and vehicles.

The latest device of note to use Alexa as a smart speaker comes from Chinese giant Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. which unveiled their first smart speaker at IFA on Friday.

Called the AI Cube, the device, visually similar to Google LLC’s Home smart speaker, differentiates itself by being a 4G mobile internet router as well. For users, that means that the AI Cube will act as typical smart speaker but also allow them to share a 4G internet connection to others, a feature that has been available is separate products previously but never built into a device like this.

Although the Huawei device will compete directly with Amazon’s own smart home speakers, Amazon’s end game is its Alexa everywhere strategy, and landing Huawei is a significant coup. The Chinese giant surpassed Apple Inc. in the second quarter to become the world’s second-largest mobile phone maker. It has faced some issues in the U.S., including a Department of Justice investigation, but it remains highly popular with a massive global retail presence, one Amazon can’t compete with.

Putting smart home speakers in front of people is key to people discovering the technology and, like rival Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., this is what Huawei brings to the table for Amazon.

Image: Huawei/Twitter