Why is it Alexa, not Alex? A century of hard-coded sexism in tech (2022)

The first attempt at an online assistant I can remember was Ask Jeeves.

I think the biggest difference in changing from a text interface to a spoken one is clarity in the spoken voice, and it's much more difficult to make a text-to-speech system easy to understand with a masculine voice than a feminine one.

Alexa is named after the company Alexa which was sold to Amazon by Brewster Kahle of archive.org fame.

The name is a reference to the Library of Alexandria.

But I think the point made by the article is valid.