Has Amazon Ruined the Name Alexa? | Hacker News Reader

Has Amazon Ruined the Name Alexa?

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I think Alexa and Siri are two examples of poor software ethics in practice. Ethics are more than just "don't kill or enslave people", but thinking about "if we make this choice, what consequences will it have, and will those consequences be negative to anyone?" In general, I think "don't name something a name which is given to people" is a not entirely obvious, but fairly good rule.

This also related to the practice that if you meet someone, and you think of a joke or quip based on your first impression, don't say it: It might be novel to you, but they've heard it before and are likely very tired of that being everyone's first interaction with them. True for names, physical characteristics, professions, etc.

I agree, it's been also going on in hurricanes and even memes (Karen). In fact how about not naming things that are already used in general (Windows). At the very least we won't have to sit through lame obvious puns but at best we don't pollute the namespace.

Related: Being married to an actual Siri made it easy for us to rule out one of the home automation platforms. (I asked, but somehow she didn’t feel like changing her name.)

> I asked, but somehow she didn’t feel like changing her name.

That's nuts. It's just a bit of paperwork!

I actually did go through the process to switch my middle and first names around.

Surprisingly, Canada needed a lot of documentation, over and beyond the traditional "two pieces of ID".

If I recall correctly, I also needed my birth certificate, the original passport used when landing in the country (as I was born abroad), and the landing papers.

It can also be a matter of pride, I think. People can like their name enough to not change it simply because some company chose to use it for their product.

Both comments were a joke, in case it went past you :)

It's a bit of paperwork, and telling everyone. And telling them again when they forget. And deciding if it's really worth updating your loyalty card that didn't need any documentation to set your name, but needs a notarized copy of an official certificate to change it.

It's rather offensive that it has become paperwork. It's your own name after all -- if you want to change it that shouldn't be anybody else's business.

It used to work that way in California until the 9/11 hysteria swept the country.

This seems staggeringly unlikely.

If you want to change what people in everyday life call you, then yes, that's not paperwork, that's just a polite request/conversation with various people (and, hopefully, they respect it).

If you want to change the name by which organizations, including the government, refer to you, then that is _by definition_ paperwork. I simply don't believe that you could have done that without submitting forms or other types of paperwork, at any point in recent history - pre- or post-9/11.

What am I misunderstanding?

> What am I misunderstanding?

Some hyperbole on my part, sorry. I really meant "official name changes, getting permission from courts etc").

About 30 years ago I married and my wife and I changed our names significantly. California marriage licenses don't mention married names at all. At the time the name law was "you may use any name you want, but may not use your name to commit fraud". Here's what I remember we did, I remember being surprised at how easy it was:

Went to the DMV and said "I want a different name on my DL". Filled out a DL application, handed over the old one and they sent me a new one. No proof of anything required. No birth cert or anything else.

Visited my (small) bank, told them I'd changed my name, showed them the DL and they changed it.

Called the credit card companies and said "please send me my cards in a different name." I recently checked my credit rating and the old name does appear in the "also known as" section (as well as various typos of it and my new name).

Went to the Social security office and they did want to look at my old SS card and my new DL. But that was all -- filled out the "order a replacement card" form and it came in my new name.

I went to the consulate of my (small) country and told them I wanted a different name. I did hand over my marriage license but as it was silent on the topic it didn't help. The consul called my mother who confirmed the change. The consul said "I could hear her eyes rolling through the phone". But they issued me a new passport, which I have renewed several times at different consulates in different countries without issue. Note: had I done this back home I don't think I would have gotten away with it. There the name change is complicated and they issue you a whole new birth certificate!

My wife went to the consulate of her (large and bureaucratic) country. At the time a change like we wanted was not even legal. But as we'd married in the USA they just accepted it as a "local law" change and issued her a new passport which she has also renewed several times without issue.

I never changed the name on my green card and have never had a problem even though it doesn't match my passport. My (now ex) wife's green card was issued in the name in her passport and no proof was ever asked to link the name change, though she may have submitted the marriage license.

We did this all casually over a year or so, though used our new names immediately. There was no rush, and back then people rarely asked for ID anyway so I don't remember anyone ever noticing that I had documents in different names (e.g. CC and DL).

Interesting context and history, thank you!

I worked with a guy in Hawaii who decided to give himself the nickname “Red” It was silly, but it worked for him I guess. (I believe it was from a movie He liked)

And an expensive ad in the paper with an appearance before a judge in most of the US.

I am acquaintances with a Siri. She's seems like a nice person, but since she works in a service industry I bet she's tired of hearing "Hey, Siri" all the time. If I was her, I'd ask for permission to not wear a name tag.

Has she considered changing the name on the tag, just at work? Just put "Jane" or something generic, or "Sarah" so it sounds similar. But yeah, it unfair that she has to be the one to change.

I don't know her well enough to ask.

I know a phrase that you can use to start the conversation.

Hey, Siri!

I almost never give my correct name for informal use (I am not a waiter, but for coffee orders and the like). Gives me a marginal amount of privacy (I mean, who cares) and makes it less likely my name will be mispronounced/misspelt with my coffee order.

If I were in a service job with a name tag I would definitely not use my real name.

I take the opposite route, my name is everywhere. (See username) The wisdom of that choice however may be questioned freely.

I have a name that is easy to pronounce but hard to spell correctly, so it's easier to give a more common name, than making people struggle and explain how to spell it.

Well at least your name isn't Michael Bolton!

That no-talent assclown!

"Alexa" sounds nice.

At one camp where I was a counselor, all the staff had made up names. I guess it was so we wouldn't get tired of hearing our real names. Having worked at several camps as a teen/young adult, I wish all had done this.

So, after all, Google deciding to use "OK, google" as introductory phrase was the better choice?

Definitely, yes! And it's helping their brand. But I doubt this would've worked with Apple or Amazon, as those are not search engines and are used differently.

Allowing Alexa devices to respond to the more generic "computer" is a not-insignificant win for Amazon IMO.

Though it can get a little confused when I'm watching Star Trek variants on a nearby TV...

Try setting it to "amazon" and then watch a video about AWS or something similar.

"Echo" is the 'safest' one for me.

Echo is also a name...

But he isn’t complaining...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecco_the_Dolphin

And Umberto is dead.

I wish I could use Echo. I have to spell words by phone using the phonetic alphabet at least once a week. And E (Echo) triggers Alexa often.

I ditched my google homes almost entirely because of ok google feeling to hail corporate - I much prefer echo or computer on the Amazon platform. I think the key is just allowing some customization.

I too work with a real-world Siri, and he is also male.

I think this sentence is kind of BS:

> Having been the 32nd most popular name for girls born in 2015, Alexa's rank dropped to 139th in 2019, the lowest it's been since 1992.

Thanks for the link provided by adjkant below, here's the ranks per year:

2019 139

2018 90

2017 65

2016 51

2015 32

2014 63

2013 60

2012 57

2011 55

2010 50

2009 43

2008 50

2007 40

2006 39

2005 66

2004 72

2003 67

2002 69

2001 78

2000 87

I agree that ranks in 2018 and 2019 is low and on point. However 2015 is already an outlier. The sentence doesn't make much sense statistically. It's a bit like picking data points purposefully.

Baby name wizard has Alexa peaking in the 1990s when combined with various other related names. [1] The specific Alexa variant peaked in 2015 but that's in the context of the related names as a whole declining precipitously, albeit not to pre-80s levels.

I must admit that a reason for the popularity spike doesn't pop to mind but presumably there's some pop culture thing I'm not thinking of.

[1] https://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager#prefix=alexa&sw=both&...

well maybe there could've been an uptick but Amazon ruined it (or maybe even amazon was responsible for the uptick in 2015?). I know from Germany that short, phonetically nice sounding names are "in" and I'd guess it's similar in the US. Alexa does sound nice, actually. Probably why Amazon took it, even.

I assume there are also distinctiveness considerations. I'm guessing the "ex" phoneme is natural to pronounce but not super-common in English. And 3 syllables is probably a good compromise between distinctiveness and being too long.

A friend of mine was a big Billy Joel fan and named his child after his song "Downeaster Alexa". This probably accounts for the some of the spike in the 80's as well.

The babynamewizard scrapes the Social Security website (I believe - I don't know any other resource for this data)... which, unfortunately, doesn't have a linkable interface (everything is a POST request).

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/

Toss "Alexa" in the "Popularity of a Name" field and select 1900 & later.

Wolfram does a nice job of it too - https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=alexa

Yes, the description and chart scream of typical journalist disinformation trying to make something seem bigger than it really is. Why does it start at 2015 when Alexa was released? We can't see if it's just continuing a trend. Also, popular baby names only last a few decades anyway, often ending their popularity with a rapid decline that looks just like this graph.

Given that Alexa was launched publicly in 2014, perhaps it was responsible for the initial increase in popularity in 2015 by raising awareness of the name?

Having been on the inside of the project and directly involved in picking the name / wake word (which happened earlier than 2014), there were multiple considerations involved.

Particularly important was the functional requirement that the wake word chosen be able to support both high recognition rates and low false positives. We also did not want to have a "helper word" such as "hey" or "ok," as that would have required enforcing an unnatural speech pattern.

It's certainly become an inconvenient name to utter around our house, due to the responses it elicits from our countertops. So my daughter came up with the idea of referring to the device as "Amelia" whenever we talk about her. It has worked brilliantly and I suggest that everyone adopt the same convention.

We use the name Lexi instead.

It's interesting how we twist our behaviour to accomodate the technology and not the other way around.

What worked great for us was not buying the thing in the first place.

Don't worry the wake word will be customizable soon enough;

You can change it to Amazon, Echo, or Computer. None of which are likely to be names of people in your house--other than the Dollhouse exception for Echo. Most people just likely prefer a more personal name which is, almost by definition, an accepted human name.

Computer is great because it reminds me of Star Trek.

While not completely customizable, it is already configurable. The Alexa/Echo devices currently support 4 wake words - Alexa, Amazon, Computer, and Echo.

I work with an Aleksa that I refer to frequently during calls, and was quite excited when I stumbled on the wake word setting in the Alexa app.

Or you could just throw away those listening devices.

Do you think unrequested snarky comments like this will actually convince anyone?

It reminds me of the web...

New frightening technology.

It's not snark, surely. It's a legitimate option. Ditch the surveillance boxes, they can't possibly augment your life in a meaningful way.

> they can't possibly augment your life in a meaningful way

Claims like this one seriously undermine the (worthwhile) privacy movement. Convenience and entertainment _are_ worthwhile uses of technology. Those of us with an understanding of privacy and surveillance technology might well make the judgement that certain forms of convenience and entertainment are not justified by the intrusion that they present - but to claim that there is _zero_ benefit to those technologies just makes you look out-of-touch or cranky to the very people who would benefit from more awareness.

Would I give up all my credit card details in order to have a marginally better music playback experience? No. Would I tell a company my birthday if they paid me $1,000,000 for it? Yes. There is a continuum of "privacy/payback evaluation", and different people lie at different points along it.

There's no reason the language model couldn't be stored locally. It doesn't need to be transmitting everything you say all the time to corporate HQ.

I have serious doubts that the storage and computation components necessary to do full TextToIntent locally would result in an economic product - but, regardless, that isn't a refutation of my point that "smart speakers do provide some value to the average user, and to pretend that they don't undermines the legitimate discussion about privacy".

This is so out of touch. If you want people to simply roll their eyes and ignore your words completely, keep on espousing arguments like that.

Alexa, Siri and co. do have legitimate use cases for people, even if they may not be useful for -you-.

What are these legitimate use cases? Controls for people with disabilities?

I 100% support disability augments. I don't see why the processing can't be localized to a device.

Agreed. Those things are useless novelty items that seem to have no genuinely useful function

It's the same problem having a dog. You can't go mentioning its name willy-nilly or it'll respond. But dogs go one step further and adapt to misuse of their name by unlearning it. I refer to ours as various insulting names even when she's not around, out of habit.

We just say "the echo" when we want to refer to it without triggering it. But you can change the hotword in Echo devices anyway, if you don't like "Alexa".

Can't you just change the prompt for the device to one of the other options? Though I dunno why they can't make it use any wake word you choose.

Because different words have very different best potential performance characteristics when used as wake words.

We would have liked to enable fully custom wake words, but it would have led to bad user experiences with the device either failing to wake up too often (false negatives) or having too many false positives or both.

So we compromised by enabling more than one, but not full choice.

Thanks for the insight.

Is it difficult to fingerprint a sound bite? Have people repeat it several times and again for each user that wants to use the custom wake word?

from my observations of the masses that Alexa and co try to cater to, that's too much work or too technical. we have to remember the average joe/jane don't know what a browser is.

It's not so much the "fingerprinting" - it's more that there are some words ("type 1") that have many relatively frequent words that sound like them, and there are other words ("type 2") that only have a very few other words (and infrequent ones at that) that sound like them.

Type 2 words make better potential wake words.

(That's not the whole story, but I think it's good model.)

I just wanted to let you know that you have caused great distress to my aunt, my daughter and my wider family through you and your colleagues thoughtless actions.

I hope someday you, and Amazon as a whole, gets its comeuppance.

Please don't personally attack people.

I'm sorry if that's the case, but our actions (at least with respect to "naming" Alexa) were extremely far from "thoughtless." There were literally thousands of hours of research, analysis, engineering, and "thought" involved.

AWS employee here.

We purposely say "ALex-uh" in group calls instead of "uhLEXa", because we talk about the service and devices all the time and using the correct pronunciation would trigger 10-15 Alexas sitting on everyone's desks!

Funny coincidence I was just wondering this a few weeks ago when reading a Tinder bio of a girl named Alexa who had something to the effect of 'heard all the Alexa jokes for a lifetime thanks'

Made me wonder if there is a class action lawsuit where all of the Alexa's could sue Amazon for psychological distress or something.

In the German speaking world the name Kevin is ruined, with some men having that name being avoided in the dating scene.

Why is Kevin ruined? Is that what Alexa is called in German?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevinism

I didn't know there was a word for that. Something similar has happened with some names in Latin America too.

I know an Alexa and she says the same. I'll admit I hadn't thought about it before but it does sound like an incredibly annoying thing to have dropped on you from on high: constant jokes, if anyone addresses you in an Amazon-enabled home all kind of crap gets triggered... I can see why people are infuriated by it.

It's like "Karen", but in this case the blame for misuse lies on a single company rather than a meme.

We shouldn't abuse people's names by using them for products, gross generalizations, etc. It's poor taste, and it frequently hurts people unintentionally.

Imagine your own name being used as a term for ridicule or poking fun. It's not a good feeling.

Thoughts go to all the Pete out there

I wonder if OJ ever got asked about his cousin Homer?

> We shouldn't abuse people's names by using them for products, gross generalizations, etc. It's poor taste, and it frequently hurts people unintentionally.

In the case of Alexa and Cortana, the intention is to treat the machine as a person you can talk to. It’s intentional that it has a human name.

Perhaps it's just my ignorance, but I was under the impression that Cortana was never really a name of a person, but adopted from the Halo franchise (now owned by Microsoft) as the name of the main character's AI companion, which sort of made the name up. If so, I think that makes it a little different.

I double-checked on Wikipedia for the disambiguation [1], but there doesn't seem to a subsection for a normal person-name of Cortana, as compared to the one for Alexa.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortana_(disambiguation)

Should have just called it "Computer" like on Star Trek.

Or let you give it whatever name you like. It's your device, in theory.

IIRC, the word 'Alexa' and the configurable alternatives 'Echo', 'Amazon', and 'Computer' are encoded into the firmware of the device itself with a wide variety of different accents accepted. Using an arbitrary word would mean everything the device hears would need to be constantly sent to Amazon so their servers could detect your custom wake word or you'd need to train the device to use your custom wake word, which would never be as accent complete as the built in wake words. That might be fine if it's just you or if everyone in your household are willing to also go through a voice recognition training session with the device.

> Using an arbitrary word would mean everything the device hears would need to be constantly sent to Amazon

Isn't it pretty well accepted that is already happening? It's why I'll never have one of these things in my house. That and I don't like talking to machines (unless I'm cursing at them).

Nope.

Chad and Dick too

> Imagine your own name being used as a term for ridicule or poking fun.

You mean like "a John"? Or "Dick"? Or "a big Charlie"? These things are old as sin, stuff like this will probably exist forever. Forbid it as much as you want, it will always come back one way or another. Or is the problem that now they "trend female", whereas they historically trended male?

I have a pretty simple name, but because it was used in the title of a popular movie at one point, I've endured jokes about it all my life. What are we going to do, have all characters nameless in media? Of course not.

Sometimes the answer really is "grow a thicker skin". Either that or abandon the "tainted" name, like it happened to Adolph/Adolf.

I'm not calling for censorship. Growing a thicker skin is a virtue. But it'd be nice if the people promulgating the trend also stopped to think about it.

> You mean like "a John"? Or "Dick"? Or "a big Charlie"?

This has been the case for so long that parents have had ample time to stop naming their children this.

They recently renamed a nearby bridge in Georgia from "Dick Hunter Memorial Bridge" [1,2].

[1] http://ethunter1.blogspot.com/2006/03/hunter-bridge-part-2.h...

[2] https://thegate.boardingarea.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/...

> parents have had ample time to stop naming their children this.

I think it would be very depressing to abandon a glorious name like John just because a bunch of prostitutes use it as shorthand.

It’s a nickname for toilet, I think that’s the bigger issue. But I know lots of Johns all ages, it’s not going away.

With the right last name, Richard can be carried with pride. I’ve met a Steele and a Hardin, they were perfectly happy to have their last name included.

John is a biblical name. Not naming your kid that because it’s also occasionally used as slang, is pants-on-head stupid. There’s also nothing wrong with Charlie.

Dick/Richard is the only one here I agree with. That is extremely commonly used slang, so it makes sense.

The odd thing, is that every single Dick I've known, real name was actually Richard. People are weird.

My bother in law has one of those names which is is a "joke" and it doesn't seem to bother him in the least. My Sister OTOH, I don't think I actually knew his full name until I was attending their wedding.

> The odd thing, is that every single Dick I've known, real name was actually Richard.

Dick is short for Richard - like Bill and William, or Bob and Robert. It goes Richard -> Rick -> Dick.

Unless what you meant was every single unpleasant person you've known was named Richard.

NHL fans are familiar of course with Richard Pound who also publicly prefers “Dick”.

I was in a call with an Alexa on Zoom and every time anyone mentions her name, my Echo would be triggered. I had to go mute Echo for the entire duration.

People are like that. Ask a tall person if he's tired of people asking, "What's the weather like up there?"

My first name is associated with a catch phrase of a particular era, and I can judge how old someone is by their reaction to it.

You live with it. You move on with your life.

Wonder how Boomer Esiason is taking to “Hey Boomer”

Whatcha talking about, Willis?

Hehe ;)

For the first dozen or so years of my life, virtually every adult I met thought they were clever by referring to me as "Sam I am" (like from the Dr. Seuss book). Although thankfully that eventually waned, I still have a very intense dislike of that phrase.

I don't know, it feels like a different category when imposed from a company & overnight.

There was an "Austin Powers" at an old workplace. Imagine being that guy, with a perfectly normal if uncommon name until one day a trailer for a new comedy spy film comes out…

Obviously not much you can do about it with films, it's possible to happen, but I'd find that _much_ more annoying that getting tall jokes.

I'm colorblind and don't get offended by people asking "is this shirt red or green" when they find out. I started enjoying it once I had enough comeback lines to pick from.

That sounds like a really great way to handle it. Find and learn the best comebacks possibly and make everyone feel good about the situation while showing off your positive attitude and wit.

People named Alexa should be given special privileges with the devices. I’m thinking muting but maybe the device should start apologizing and arranging free packages.

I wish these companies wouldn't anthropomorphize the systems so much. I catch my mother calling Siri "her", and my wife calls Google Assistant "her" because she has it set to a feminine voice. I try to remind our small children that it's just a computer, there is no person behind it.

It's important, because I've noticed that folks who humanize these assistants start having expectations of their capabilities that far exceed their reality. If you understand the assistant to be a crappy menu system on top of a regular, ol' Google Search, you can start to use them more effectively. My father thinks yelling the same request, word for word, will get a different response from Google. You might as well have tried typing a search into the Google website, got the wrong results, and then typed in the same search in all-caps.

There's almost no continuity between commands. I wish they would not create continuity for the extremely small subset of factoid lookup commands they've manually programmed in and just leave everything to a single, unified model that is more predictable.

I use Google Assistant to check the weather, add items to the family grocery list, play music, and entertain the kids with animal sounds. That's about all it's good for. It does it pretty well. But to expect more is an exercise in frustration.

i heard there are some parents that make their kids say "thank you" or "please" to their voice assistants. that really bothers me for some reason. its like putting "please" at the end of a google search. its just plain illogical

I remember this coming up in a Star Trek episode where a character would say 'please' and 'thank you' to the ship computer.

Just a friendly reminder that baby names are adult names.

And that children are people and not stylish accessories.

I used to keep my child in my murse but then he outgrew it

It's more relevant to call them baby names when considering popularity since that's the age of the person when their name is chosen. This recent decline is only a decline in baby names, not necessarily adult names.

Yes, and the internet has ruined the name Karen, too.

Yep, they basically "cancelled" an entire name. I know two people named Karen, both of whom are kind and sweet ladies, and they are sick of it. I am just hoping that my name is not next.

It's a meme. Nobody called to "cancel" the name.

people ruined the name Dick, Mickey and Fanny long before the internet was even a thing

If amazon ruined the name it was surely when Alexa was first used as a spyware IE plugin and it's accompanying website popularity ranking.

I'm kind of surprised they ever used the brand for anything after that.

I have a niece Alexa, their family just set their Echo device's wake word to Echo.

Alexa, Karen, Chad...Yours could be next.

It's even worse if its your surname like Poindexter or something, kinda hard to get a surname nickname.

Perhaps the upside of having a biblical name that is shared by 10 million other Americans is that it probably isn't too easy to twist it into an insult.

Edit: that may be an overestimate. Still one of the most popular names in the US, but a more official source (SS) suggests there are no single names which are shared by more than about 5M people.

> a more official source (SS) suggests there are no single names which are shared by more than about 5M people.

You're telling me there are fewer than 5 million Michaels or Johns? I would have thought more.

SS lists the most popular male names in the US over the last 100 years as James (4.7M), John (4.5M), Robert (4.5M), and Michael (4.3M).[1]

Using standard US mortality data, Wolfram Alpha reports estimates of 3.853M and 3.26M for Michael and John respectively, currently alive in the US.[2][3]

[1]: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/decades/century.html

[2]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=michael

[3]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=john

Sure, it first ruined the name Amazon.

Exactly!

Try being called Beavis in the 90s with MTVs show.

May be a correlation can be made with Siri. Has the number of people named Siri (if any) gone up? From an ethical point I wonder the true affect of using a name that already exists in society. I do see the effect it has as it is intended to be more human-like.

The same as why you might name your dog George. Should there be robot-like names.

Would have been interesting to see data-points from before 2015...

https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/babyname.cgi should do it

Is there a way to get the raw percentages rather than the rank?

Especially once you get outside the top 10 or so, I expect the percentages quickly get very small and very close. Even 5% would make a name astoundingly common. Like, more than one in every classroom common.

'The year when the name Alexa was most popular is 2015. In that year, the number of births is 6052, which represents 0.311 percent of total female births in 2015.'

From https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/babyname.cgi

Yeah but I am interested in looking at the trend line then doing a regression discontinuity analysis.

Right - the year after Amazon's Alexa was announced.

Alexa now joins Adolph. Those would be perfect names for a fairy tale of evil twins, for sure.

My wife’s name begins with the letter A, and we considered many names for our daughter, but Alexa was absolutely off the list.

Yes.

Amazon has ruined the name Amazon.

A word that used to command respect and awe now connotates shipping waste and overworked warehouse laborers.

Not really. If I say "she is an Amazon!" you will think I'm saying she's a female warrior instead of a megacorporation.

Nope, I think of those people wearing the little blue jackets that say Amazon on them packing up boxes or running around grocery stores fetching shopping items.

It would be interesting to know what proportion of the population of which countries would think which.

It probably now commands even more widespread respect and awe - but for the corporation.

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