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Comment by cobrabyte | Hacker News Reader

It's sort of wild to think that Amazon purchased Alexa.com in 1999 for ~$250M in stock, and that stock would be worth more than $7B today, if my math is correct.

Bought a website ranking company, used the company's name as the name of a consumer electronics assistant, and then shuttered the company 22 years later to (presumably) be able to use the domain name for more consumer electronics.

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In essense, what the original Alexa did seems to have been internalized into Amazon ads (or their b2b analytics division), which is coincidently the fastest growing part of Amazon.

Wonder why they used the Alexa name for their home assistant.

Short, international, neutral name, somewhat easy to pronounce in many languages.

It's also phonetically recognizable and distinct.

It's one of the reasons you have to say "Hey Google" or "Hey Siri", but you're able to just say "Alexa"

I find Siri the worst one for that, it often triggers on "serious".

If our Google Home triggers accidentally its usually easy to think back on what we said and find the offending phrase. Siri, on the other hand, seems to trigger several times a day without any explanation.

I wonder if the problem is the /s/ sound at the beginning of Siri.

Since it's a fricative, it sounds like the hissing noise produced by other kinds of turbulent flow.

It's ok, you can just say "fart".

Except that when my business partner and I are talking to each other about Alexa, we have to refer to it indirectly, e.g. "the A-lady", to avoid triggering his Alexa devices (I don't normally have one active).

As mentioned above, to my roommate and me, it's "the A bitch." :D

The nice thing about "OK Google" was that it sounded a lot like "Cocaine Poodle", so you could imagine your personal assistant was a hyperactive creature of limited intelligence. Which honestly, sets expectations appropriately.

I would like to briefly visit your reality.

You can find a dealer at a corner near you X-)

"Hay Poodle" seems, if not quite as good, to be in the same spirit.

My favorite command is: "Obey, Booble! Bind my bone!"

Which is close enough to make Google find my phone :D

That's quite the incantation.

Something something indistinguishable from magic.

not sure if it's still the case, but in a similar vein you used to be able to say "hey booboo" to google devices

My watch’s Siri seems to trigger when washing my hands, or sometimes when I am in the kitchen and somebody else opens the tap.

I was on a zoom call the other day, both of us using speaker (no headsets) and something trigger both our watches to say, “sorry, I didn’t get that”, in each of our languages. At least we both laughed.

Mine too, but I think you’re probably holding down the crown in the physical action of the washing. Your hands are bent in unusual ways and the back of your hand pushes up against the crown.

I don’t think it’s responding to a vocal ‘Hey, Siri!’ in this case.

My “Hey Siri” triggers on the first attempt 25% of the time (neutral North American accent).

I wonder if it’s a slow wake-from-sleep issue or something.

It works pretty much 100% here and I have a Dutch accent with Irish influences :) What kind of hardware do you use? Homepod or phone?

Old (supported) iPhone

"Let's, uhh..." is a pretty common sentence starter in conversation and has been observed to trigger Alexa before.

Yes, this is why we can't talk about Alexa at home. My roommate and I, if we're not talking to it, refer to it as "the A bitch." :D

It’s also been a popular name for decades, http://www.ourbabynamer.com/Alexa-name-popularity.html.

IMO, picking one of the most common US names for a voice assistant and then skipping the wake up phrase is dumb.

> one of the most common US names

With ~125k total names since the 1940's, it's not really close to one of the most common in the US; just one that was in the top 100 for 2 decades.

I'd say top 100 for about the last 25 years makes it pretty common. What surprises me a bit is that it didn't fall off a cliff after Amazon's Alexa came out.

"Alexa" seems to have fallen of a cliff since Amazon's device, though. If this site is accurate: https://nameberry.com/babyname/Alexa

"Alexandra" seems way more common than "Alexa".

Yeah I have a friend called Alexa and it absolutely infuriates her. Can't say I blame her.

At least you can change the wake word on Amazon devices

All Apple devices interpret "Hey Sarah" as "Hey Siri" and then start shooting their stupid mouths off, bugs the hell out of Sarah

I have 2 home pod mini's, a homepod, an iphone and ipad and i just said "hey sarah" 5 times in different ways and I got no response.

I asked my Google Assistant if I could call her Siri.

She said "Why? Have I done something wrong? If so, yes this is Siri!"

I'm not even kidding. She's also said "That might get confusing" before or something like that.

I just tried this and it didn't happen.

Yeah I wish I could change the wakeword. I moved to a homepod mini from echo dots for more privacy but it's annoying but being able to change it. I'd prefer one that's one word Iike.

Also bad that it won't check your email etc without an iPhone.. Not very happy with it in general but I love the yellow colour and I trust Apple a bit more for privacy.

One thing that is great is that it matches your own volume. If I ask a question quietly at night Siri responds in a very low volume whereas the echo dot just booms like it's daytime.

My Google home accepts being called a variety of things that aren't Google, possibly in order to accept different accents or slurring, possibly just because it's not very strict with exact sounds being used. I imagine this is actually a good thing if you're half asleep talking into the pillow, have an uncommon accent, etc.

- googoo - googah - guhguh - gulgul - doodle - doodoo - booboo - booble - ok gool (but not hey gool)

I know it's not perfect, but if you use Amazon's Alexa and know an Alexa you can change the wake phrase to a few others (iirc "echo" and "amazon" are among the choices).

Our wake word is "amazon", lest we forget a major corporation is listening in to our conversations about who left the fridge open and whether we need to wear a raincoat today.

It’s not just a question of being a friend or family members name name. It’s also easy for a YouTube video etc to accidentally include say “Alexia turn off the lights” as part of seemingly innocent dialog that nobody building it thinks is going to cause a problem.

It's been literally years since someone saying Alexa on a TV show or elsewhere have triggered my devices. Occasionally I've seen them switch to "listen", but they've gotten good at not reacting.

I'm assuming part of it is that it's gotten very good at recognising who is speaking. E.g. my son and I tested the limits of it a while back by changing voices (it still correctly identified my son when he tried to change his voice), mixing and matching (I'd say "Alexa" and he would say "who am I?" and vice versa; Alexa would recognise whomever said "Alexa" irrespective of who spoke what followed). So it'll usually know if whomever is saying "Alexa" is a known member of the household, which would seem like a good indicator to increase the threshold for how clearly the phrase is spoken before activating.

I'm pretty sure this is exactly how Google does it (only matching voices on the keyword); my Google home will ignore anyone else saying "ok Google", however if someone's yelling at me from another room or talking on the phone in the hallway, it's impossible to get anything useful out of it; it'll activate on the keyword and start processing whatever the first sounds it hears (dinner's ready, ok, ok, ok; I'm leaving now; you've got a phone call; etc). Before I have a chance to tell it to pause my music so I can hear the person yelling, it responds to them, not me. Before I can ask for the weather, it responds to someone walking by on the phone that happens to say something just outside my door at just the wrong time (this happens often when you live with people working from home)

I'm guessing there's something about how they're doing recognition of who is speaking that would make it hard to scale the cloud based speech recognition. Though I also notice that Alexa can answer more questions with the network down than it used to. Early on it was pretty much only the wake words, and then it'd given an error no matter what. Now it "listens" and will answer some requests to some degree without a network connection (e.g. if you ask to set an alarm it'll tell you the network is down and it can't set new alarms, but that it will still alert you, so it'd seem the full smarts of parsing an alarm request goes to the cloud, but it recognises at least enough to know you've asked about an alarm)

It's not dumb, it is a strategy.

>Early on, the team realized they needed a "wake word" that would make the device start listening. The word would need to have three syllables, a "distinct combination of phonemes" so as not to unnecessarily rouse the device, and an easily marketable name, like Apple's Siri.

https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/news/here-are-the-other-name...

This just struck me, and I don't know if it's true, but a-lex could be a play on Greek and Latin for "not" and "written." Which is a pretty good name for a voice-based input system.

Lex is the name of the AWS service that provides NLP based chatbot functionality

It is what drives A-lex-a under the hood.

https://aws.amazon.com/lex/

In addition it uses another AWS service called Polly that generates speech from text.

You have the order of creation wrong. AWS Lex, Polly, and Transcribe began as forks of Alexa's NLU, TTS (which was an aquisition called Ivona), and ASR components.

Source: I worked for Alexa at the time.

Oh, now I’m confused. I thought this was about the Alexa assistant product. Seems from other comments that this company provides web analysis.

According to my former manager who worked on the Alexa team at one point, it was a name with a high true-positive rate for their voice recognition system.

They'd already cleared the trademark!

They don't need to shutter the company to reuse the domain. They could have moved the company to alexarank.com .

Did they just have extreme foresight about wanting the domain alexa.com or were they genuinely interested in alexa.com as a product? They kept it around for 22 years after all but I can't see how what alexa.com used to do has anything to do with what amazon is doing.

Foresight? Or just picked Alexa because they happened to have the domain and it's a good brand name for this?

Good point. But then I wonder why they bought it in the first place.

I'm pretty sure they were interested in the company as a product.

They bought it for data gathering and market/competitor research. I was with Amazon at the time. Was great for keeping track of what products were drawing most traction on eBay (Longaberger baskets and Beanie babies, says my vague memory)

10 Billion. Honestly seems kind of low? I guess in SPY that would be only $650m, so definitely beating the benchmark.

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