Amazon, can we have our name back?

The tens of thousands of Americans named ‘Alexa’ have reasons to be annoyed

When Erim Corado gave birth to her first child, she wanted a name to honor her boyfriend Alexis Morales Jr., who died a few months before their daughter arrived in 1993.

So Corado chose Alexa Jade Morales, hoping to give her daughter a piece of the father she would never know.

Alexa Morales wore her name proudly. But after Amazon launched its voice service, also called Alexa, in November 2014, people began speaking to Morales differently. She said they made jokes about her name, giving her commands or asking her questions in a robotic tone.

“When I hear my name now, it’s not good thoughts, it’s like, tensing,” said Morales, 28, a pharmacy technician and student in Bridgeport, Conn.

Nearly 130,000 people in the United States have the name Alexa. In 2015, more than 6,000 baby girls in the United States were named Alexa. But after Amazon chose Alexa as the wake word of its voice service, the name’s popularity plummeted. In 2020, only about 1,300 babies were given the name.

When I asked one of the three Alexa devices owned by Morales’ mother about the reason for the decline, it suggested it was “perhaps as a result of its connection to Amazon Echo devices.”

By 2018, Morales began to go by Lex. She stopped buying from Amazon, too, partly because of the device name and partly because of what she has heard about the working conditions inside the company’s warehouses.

“I can’t even look at Amazon stuff anymore without wanting to kick the package over,” Morales said. “It was like, you guys have so much money and so many people working for you and not one person thought to be like, ‘Listen, Alexa is a name that people use.’ ”

I interviewed more than 25 women and girls named Alexa and several parents of Alexas to see how the voice assistant’s rapid takeover of workplaces and homes had altered their feelings about their name and identity. A few were indifferent to the connection or amused by it. But the majority were tired of interruptions from the bot and by jokes at their expense. In virtual classes, business meetings and at auditions, Alexas said they have been instructed to avoid saying their name or arbitrarily assigned new names.

Amazon chose the name Alexa because it “was inspired by the Library of Alexandria and is reflective of Alexa’s depth of knowledge,” Lauren Raemhild, a public relations specialist for Amazon, said in a statement.

Phillip Hunter, the head of user experience for Amazon Alexa Skills from September 2016 to March 2018, said he now recognizes the unintended consequences.

“They were hoping to sort of humanize it, but at the cost of other humans’ feelings,” Hunter said in an interview. “If your product is causing people difficulty, you should figure that out first and reconsider.”

He thinks Amazon should avoid a human name and the wake word should be changed to “something more utilitarian.”