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For Seattle Women Called Alexa, Frustrating To Share Name With Amazon Device (seattletimes.com) 79

Reader reifman writes: Since Amazon introduced the Alexa-enabled Echo device in 2014, the jokes have become so omnipresent that Alexa Philbeck, 29, briefly considered changing, or at least obscuring, her name. The Seattle Times speaks to four women unfortunately called Alexa in a town that may soon be known as Seamazon.
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For Seattle Women Called Alexa, Frustrating To Share Name With Amazon Device

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  • Yeah right (Score:5, Funny)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Saturday July 22, 2017 @07:18AM (#54857219) Homepage Journal
    Give it a break Amazon PR, no one uses Alexa.
    • by Oliver Wendell Jones ( 158103 ) on Saturday July 22, 2017 @07:34AM (#54857271)
      I seriously doubt that...

      "Alexa... How many people use Amazon Echo? Really? Only one? But I have one...."
    • No freaking kidding, right? I am a Washingtonian and I no joke, no scam, know someone that actually IS named Alexa AND lives in Seattle. Literally no one has made that joke to her ever. Not. One.

      Blatant PR is blatant. And stupid PR is just one reasons why I just shut Amazon products and services as a block.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    My name is "Ok Google" and I live in San Francisco.

  • Alexa sounds like a name for a Backpage prostitute.

  • How easy it is to change the keyword "alexa"? Does it have a backup keyword?

    The unix command line stream editor sed is as old as unix. It uses / as the delimiter to denote strings. But it is trivially easy to change the delimiter if your strings contain /. It does not use a backup delimiter to allow / because what if the string is going to have both / and the backup delimiter? It allows one to use ANY ASCII character as the delimiter. Unless your strings contain ALL the ASCII character you would be able to

    • by Anonymous Coward

      You have the choice of "Alexa", "Amazon" or "Computer". Unfortunately it doesn't allow you to arbitrarily assign it a name.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      At least with sed, it's reset on every invocation. Immagine someone recompiled your sed binary and made the delimiter 0x1b. How do you find out what it is?

      Same with Alexa: a guest in your house has a brief moment alone with her and renames her to a tongue twister in a language you don't speak.

  • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Saturday July 22, 2017 @10:42AM (#54857927)

    ... could change her name to Cortana. There's not much chance of a namespace collision with that one.

  • Like "Ok-Google", "Cortana" or even "Siri" (although, in all fairness, maybe siri and cortana exist in non-western cultures)...

    That way, there is no interference with people with the same name as the virtual Assistants...

    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Like "Ok-Google", "Cortana" or even "Siri" (although, in all fairness, maybe siri and cortana exist in non-western cultures)...

      That way, there is no interference with people with the same name as the virtual Assistants...

      Siri's voice activation command is "Hey Siri", thus avoiding a collision with someone named that. Of course, some dumba** will name their new baby "HeySiri" just to confuse things. At least "OK Google" sounds stupid enough that no one would want to use it as a name... right?

      I don't know wha

  • ... how hard it must be for girls called "Siri", or even "Google Now".

    • A "waking nightmare" endured by anyone who shares a name with someone famous, or whose parents decided to name them after a thing.
  • It seems to me that the most appropriate response to someone trying to give you orders because your name is "Alexa" is to say "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that".

  • Alexa kind of fits as a name for a Seattle hipster barmaid, but Phil would be hipper..

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