How To Pronounce Alexa?
Alexa is pronounced aa-L EH KS-aa- † † English pronunciation guide: AA as in ‘odd (AA.D)’ ; L as in ‘lay (L.EY)’ ; EH as in ‘ebb (EH.B)’ ; K as in ‘key (K.IY)’ ; S as in ‘see (S.IY)’ ; AA as in ‘odd (AA.D)’ ;
Why Alexa is called Alexa?
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, referring to the late-pharaonic-era institution in Egypt.
Is Alexa she or it?
“I’m not a woman or a man. I’m an AI.” – — Amazon’s Alexa In an Amazon ad that aired during the Super Bowl on Sunday, a woman admiring the spherical contours of the company’s Echo speaker reimagines her Alexa voice assistant as the actor Michael B. Jordan.
- Instead of the disembodied female voice that comes standard in the device, requests for shopping list updates, measurement conversions and adjustments to the home lighting and sprinkler systems are fulfilled by the smoldering star, in person — voice, eyes, abs and all.
- Her husband hates it.
- Depicting Alexa as a masculine presence is funny because — at least according to Amazon’s official line — the cloud-based voice service has no gender at all.
“I’m not a woman or a man,” Alexa says sweetly when asked to define its gender. “I’m an AI.” Alexa is sold with a default female-sounding voice and has a female-sounding name. Alexa is subservient and eager to please. If you verbally harass or abuse Alexa, as the journalist Leah Fessler discovered in 2017, Alexa will feign ignorance or demurely deflect.
- Amazon and its competitors in the digital assistant market may deny it, but design and marketing have led to AI that seems undeniably, well, feminine.
- What does it mean for humans that we take for granted that the disembodied voices we boss around at home are female? How does the presence of these feminized voice assistants affect the dynamics between the actual women and men who use them? “The work that these devices are intended to do” — making appointments, watching the oven timer, updating the shopping list — “all of those kinds of areas are gendered,” said Yolande Strengers, an associate professor of digital technology and society at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
Dr. Strengers is a co-author of “The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot.” The book examines technologies that perform traditionally feminized roles, including housekeeping robots like the Roomba, caregiving robots like the humanoid Pepper or Paro seal, sex robots and, of course, the multitasking, ever-ready voice assistants.
Dr. Strengers and her co-author, Jenny Kennedy, a research fellow at RMIT University in Melbourne, explore the ways in which gendering technology influences users’ relationship with it. Because Alexa and similar assistants like Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Google Home, are perceived as female, users order them around without guilt or apology, and may sling abuse and sexualized comments their way.
And when users become frustrated with the devices’ errors, they interpret glitches as inferior capability, or female “ditziness.” Owners of the devices are also not threatened by them — and thus are less inclined to question how much data they are collecting, and what it might be used for.
- Research on digital voice and gender by the former Stanford professor Clifford Nass found that people consider female-sounding voices helpful and trustworthy, and male voices more authoritative.
- The work of Professor Nass, who died in 2013, is often cited in discussions of voice assistants, yet many of those studies are now two decades old.
An Amazon spokesperson would say only that the current feminine voice was “preferred” by users during testing. But preferred over what? And by whom? Some assistants, like Siri, offer the option to change the default female voice to a male voice. Alexa comes standard with a female voice whose accent or language can be changed.
- For an additional $4.99, a user can swap Alexa’s voice for that of the actor Samuel L.
- Jackson, but only for fun requests like “tell me a story” or “what do you think of snakes?” Only the female voice handles housekeeping tasks like setting reminders, shopping, or making lists.
- The book “The Smart Wife” belongs to a body of research examining how artificially intelligent devices reflect the biases of the people who design them and the people who buy them — in both cases, mostly men.
(Dr. Strengers and Dr. Kennedy have found that setting up the digital infrastructure is one chore in an opposite-sex household that’s more likely to be done by men.) Take the devices’ response to sexually aggressive questions. “You have the wrong sort of assistant,” Siri replied when Ms.
Fessler, the journalist, asked the bot for sex as part of her investigation, The coy phrasing, Dr. Strengers and Dr. Kennedy write, suggests there is another type of assistant out there who might welcome such propositions. Since the publication of Ms. Fessler’s article, voice assistants have become more forthright.
Siri now responds to propositions for sex with a flat “no.” Amazon also updated Alexa to no longer respond to sexually explicit questions. When it comes to gender and technology, tech companies often seem to be trying to have it both ways: capitalizing on gendered traits to make their products feel familiar and appealing to consumers, yet disavowing the gendered nature of those features as soon as they become problematic.
- Tech companies are probably getting themselves into a bit of a corner by humanizing these things — they’re not human,” said Mark West, an education project author with Unesco and lead author of the organization’s 2019 report on gender parity in technology,
- The report and its associated white papers noted that feminized voice assistants perpetuate gender stereotypes of subservience and sexual availability and called for, among other things, an end to the practice of making digital assistants female by default.
If designers initially chose to have their products conform to existing stereotypes, he said, they can also choose to reject those tropes as well. “There’s nothing inevitable about this stuff. We collectively are in control of technology,” Mr. West said.
“If this is the wrong path to go down, do something.” One intriguing alternative is the concept of a gender-neutral voice. Q, billed by its creators as ” the world’s first genderless voice assistant,” debuted at the SXSW festival in 2019 as a creative collaboration among a group of activists, ad makers and sound engineers, including Copenhagen Pride and the nonprofit Equal AI,
Might Alexa have a gender-neutral future? An Amazon spokesperson declined to specifically confirm whether the company was considering a gender-neutral voice, saying only that “We’re always looking for ways to give customers more choice.” Taking gender out of voice is a first step, Dr.
Strengers and Dr. Kennedy said, but it doesn’t remove gender from the relationships people have with these devices. If these machines do what is traditionally considered women’s work, and that work is still devalued and the assistant is talked down to, we aren’t moving forward. In Her Words is available as a newsletter.
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Who is Alexa or Siri?
Difference Between Alexa vs Siri – The following article provides an outline for Alexa vs Siri. Siri and Alexa are the common words spoken, day in day out by computer users and they are called by the users to execute sundry tasks digitally. Siri and Alexa are the most popular digital assistant tools owned by Apple computers and Amazon respectively and many artificial intelligence technologies like natural language processing, voice recognition and machine learning are used in these tool to service the users innovatively.
- Google Assistant, Samsung Bixby and Microsoft Crotona are the other popular digital assistant tools in the market.
- Alexa and Siri have comparable features and capabilities matching with each other.
- These products underwent constant upgrades and enhancements during the last five years and they are on equal footing but still there is a slight difference in their performance.
Siri is a digital assistant software tool well integrated into IOS and this tool enable users to get responses on their queries answered on near restaurants or latest movies or weather conditions or flight details and perform actions based on users commands like sending emails, calling someone over phone and book tickets and confirming the action orally.
This software recognizes the language as naturally spoken by the user and it does not expect the user to use special command or speak in a sophisticated way for it to act. With constant learning Siri adjusts itself with the way the user speaks and performs the task with minimal interaction. Even it understands long sentence spoken by the users and execute the tasks.
Siri increases the productivity of users and saves time. Alexa started as a smart speaker loaded with Alexa software, capable of listening to users query and responding back with answers, many house hold devices were later integrated through Alexa and controlled by smartphones from anywhere.
Can girl name Alex?
Alex – Baby Name Meaning, Origin, and Popularity | Nameberry Diminutive of Alexandra or Alexis “defending men” The name Alex is both a boy’s name and a girl’s name of Greek origin meaning “defending men”. One of the most evenly divided unisex names these days; strong and energetic, if overused, for both genders.
Is Alex unisex name?
A true unisex name, Alex is a popular pick for both sexes. As a short form of Alexander or Alexandra, meaning ‘defender of mankind,’ Alex retains its classic roots while still being modern and independent.
Why is it called Alex?
| Statue of Alexander III “The Great” of Macedon, the best-known bearer of the name, whose fame popularized the name’s use throughout Europe and Asia | |
| Pronunciation | Ancient Greek : Modern Greek : Czech: German: Polish: Russian: Serbo-Croatian: Swedish: |
|---|---|
| Gender | Male |
| Name day | August 30 |
| Origin | |
| Word/name | Via Latin Alexander, originally from the Greek Ἀλέξανδρος ( Aléxandros ), from αλέξειν aléxein meaning “to ward off, keep off, turn away, defend, protect” and ἀνδρός andrós, genitive of ἀνήρ anḗr meaning “man”. |
| Meaning | “Defender, protector of man” |
| Other names | |
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Alexander is a male given name, The most prominent bearer of the name is Alexander the Great, the king of the Ancient Greek kingdom of Macedonia who created one of the largest empires in ancient history. Variants listed here are Aleksandar, Aleksander and Aleksandr,
Can you teach Alexa pronunciation?
Speech synthesis markup language – The main approach for teaching pronunciation is through or speech synthesis markup language, This is a powerful language that allows you to control how Alexa speaks. It allows you to add pauses, inflections, and other speech effects. SSML is an XML language where you describe exactly what you want to happen. speak > I emphasis level = “strong” > really emphasis > want to learn SSML. speak > Code language: HTML, XML ( xml ) Alexa’s SSML allows you to change a huge range of things. These include:
which changes the style of speech (e.g. conversation, news report, etc.) which lets you define things like shouting, whispering, etc. which tells Alexa to sound excited or disappointed which controls the rate, pitch and volume of what Alexa says
There are many other tags available as described,
How can I speak English with Alexa?
Ask questions and practise pronunciation. First up, you can practise your speaking by asking Alexa a variety of questions and listening to her responses. You can ask her anything related to general knowledge, the news or even personal questions.
How old is Siri?
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SRI International SRI International – American Nonprofit Research Institute 
Siri – 2007 Siri, the first virtual personal assistant, arose from decades of research in artificial intelligence (AI) at SRI International. The technology was developed through the SRI-led Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes (CALO) project within DARPA’s Personalized Assistant that Learns (PAL) program – the largest-known AI project in U.S.
Who is Alexa’s male voice?
Meet Ziggy, Alexa’s male counterpart on Amazon Echo speakers.
Can Alexa scare someone?
How to create a scary smart routine with Alexa – As with a lot of smart home setups, it’s a good idea to make sure Alexa and your smart devices are all up to date. When you’re ready, here’s what to think about. Step 1: If you haven’t already connected compatible smart devices with your Alexa app, do so now.
Everything needs to be connected and searchable in Alexa for these steps to work. Step 2: Open up your Alexa app. In the bottom right of the home screen, select the More button. Step 3: Select Routines from the menu. Step 4: Choose the Plus sign in the upper-right corner to create a new routine. Step 5: Enter the routine name.
Name your spooky routine something obvious, like “Halloween” or “Scary” so you’ll be able to identify it easily later on. 
Step 6: Now select the When this happens section. For the best results, we advise choosing Voice to control your spooky routine. Now you can program the voice command to be something meaningful, like, “Alexa, boo!” or “Alexa, spooky time!” or even, “Alexa, scare me!” Step 7: Now select Next, and choose the Add action section. 
Step 8: Add another action. You can also choose Alexa says and have Alexa say something suitably spooky. Or, you could go to Music and podcasts and set up the routine to play Monster Mash or another song – or, for ambiance, an audio track with booming thunder noises,
- Step 9: Audio options are just the beginning of what Alexa can do.
- Select Smart home next, and view all your available devices.
- Say you have a compatible smart bulb: set it to dim, turn red, or flash to complete the effects (or a different action for each bulb you have).
- Sometimes, simply turning all the bulbs off at once is the scariest part.
Step 10: Alexa has limited control over smart TVs, but think about adding a TV action to turn the TV on and off as part of your effects. However, if you have a Fire TV, Alexa has enhanced compatibility to let you choose specific content, so you can set it to show a scary movie or a video playlist suitable for Halloween.
- Choose the Fire TV section to learn more.
- Step 11: If you have an idea of what you want Alexa to do but can’t find a category, select Custom and type in your idea for a command to see if Alexa has any related options.
- You may also get more ideas just by browsing your Smart home section to see available devices and what they can do.
Spooky effects like telling a smart lock to lock or a smart plug to turn on an appliance can lead to fun results. 
Do you say Alexa or hey Alexa?
Always use ‘Alexa’ as the wake word at start of utterances. Never refer to Alexa with ‘Hey’ in any utterance (e.g., ‘Hey Alexa’).
What are Alexa pronouns?
They and them are considered when used to refer to an assistant in the singular. See Appendix A for further details and acces to the corpus. Users overwhelmingly appear to personify Alexa and Siri, and perceive them to be female-gendered: up to 76.5% of users refer to Alexa as ‘her’ and even over 81% for Siri.