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!
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.
Alexa, Siri and co. do have legitimate use cases for people, even if they may not be useful for -you-.
New frightening technology.
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.
I hope someday you, and Amazon as a whole, gets its comeuppance.
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?
Type 2 words make better potential wake words.
(That's not the whole story, but I think it's good model.)
What worked great for us was not buying the thing in the first place.
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.