On the other hand, Amazon Alexa is 8 years old, so if you have a 6 year old child called Alexa some of the responsibility has to be on the parents..
Why should parents be expected to predict the future popularity of a major corporation's use of the same name?
Other voice assistants aren't as easy to pronounce as Alexa as well; Mycroft, Siri, Ok Google, Bixby.
Those examples tell us that teams making these products do think about the impact of the name they choose if they're willing to accept something less "name like" will still work well, and maybe the Alexa team could have done better.
Much more common than Alexa.
I don't know I just like the image of MS's product being that irrelevant.
So, your mother's name was Alexandra, you decide to give that name to your daughter. But, no, because Amazon took ownership of that name.
There are things that people value when naming their children, that includes usually loved ones. Big corporations are not in the list of things to take into account. If it has to be now we are in a dark place.
It certainly is surprising to me that kids would care. And then that they would think an AI product is a negative versus a positive or neutral example of the name. I thought bullies were more concerned with physical prowess or complexion or such things.
Maybe they should just deal with the bullies themselves rather than blaming 3rd parties for the insults bullies come up with.
Of course they did. They could have raised it at any point. That would be input.
I think your question is really "Did the engineers have any real power over the name?". Obviously the final decision came down to someone who probably wasn't an engineer, but that doesn't mean the engineering team couldn't influence the outcome at all. Engineers can't abdicate all responsibility for the outcomes of their work simply because they don't make the final decision. Everyone on a project is responsible in some way for what happens as a result of it.
I think the question as I posed it works just fine. One simply needs a reasonable standard of what it means to have input. By your standard, everyone on earth had input since we all could have personally hounded Jeff Bezos with tweets or thrown ourselves in front of Amazon trucks as they tried to leave the warehouses. But certain employees were responsible for making these specific decisions on behalf of the company and those people may or may not have accepted input from employees. I suspect you already know what process is most likely to be in place at a large company like Amazon.
Of all things I am suspicious of why they would choose a female name for an assistant.
Alexa is easy to recognize by software with very low error rate unlike Sarah or Ben.
> Of all things I am suspicious of why they would choose a female name for an assistant.
For the same reason airport announcements are usually voiced by women. For the same reason satnav is voiced by women. For the same reason language learning tapes are voiced by women. People (both men and women) are more comfortable listening to women.
I suspect you suspect it is because of assistant being women stereotype, not it's not that, and no need to look for social injustice everywhere.
They are going to lose on that front no matter which way they go, so likely the best approach is to pick which works best technically. I'd expect that would be a female voice due to less low frequency components, making it easier to get it to sound good on a small speaker.