What Does The Name Alexa Mean?

What Does The Name Alexa Mean

Alexa

Origin
Gender	Female
Language(s)	Greek
Meaning	defender of human
Other names
See also	Alexander Alexandra Alexis Alexia Alex Alexa

Alexa is a female form of Alex, It is variously a given name in its own right or a short form of Alexandra, both of which come from the Greek name Alexandros. It can be broken down into alexo meaning “to defend” and ander meaning “man”, making both Alexa and Alexandra mean “defender of man”. The similarly-spelled name Aleksa is a South Slavic masculine name.

Is Alexa a good name for a girl?

Alexa Name Meaning – A shortened form of Alexandra, Alexa means “defender of man.” With her powerful meaning and electric sound, it’s no surprise that she’s a popular pick among today’s parents. Alexa is a name with modern appeal, filling the role as an updated form of a classic name.

Despite originating as a nickname, she stands tall on her own, holding her place as a name and avoiding the incomplete feel seen in other shortened forms of Alexandra like Lexi,
Regal and mature, she avoids feeling too youthful.
She’s adorable on a little one but does age gracefully along with her wearer.

If you’re a fan of nicknames, she does have a few including Ali and Lex, Alexa has some serious fashionista vibes, a name fit for a runway or photo studio. She has an energy that’s inescapable, carrying her down the streets of Manhattan and Paris alike.

How rare is the name Alexa?

Nearly 130,000 people in the United States have the name Alexa.

How many girls are named Alexa?

Parents are fleeing from a name that can be, at best, a nuisance and, at worst, associated with subservience. What Does The Name Alexa Mean Getty; Paul Spella / The Atlantic Alexa used to be a name primarily given to human babies. Now it’s mainly for robots. Seven years ago, Amazon released Alexa, its voice assistant, and as the number of devices answering to that name has skyrocketed, its popularity with American parents has plummeted.

In fact, it has suffered one of the sharpest declines of any popular name in recent years.
Alexa stands alone as a name that was steadily popular—not a one-year celebrity wonder, not a fading past favorite—that was pushed off the popularity cliff,” Laura Wattenberg, the founder of the naming-trends website Namerology, told me.

At first, the number of baby Alexas spiked following the voice assistant’s rollout in late 2014—perhaps parents heard the name in the news and liked it—but it has since crashed. Likely, parents began to realize that having the name could be a nuisance, or worse, could become associated with subservience, because people are always giving orders to their virtual Alexas.

This up-and-down pattern reminded Wattenberg of what happens with babies named after hurricanes, when “the news coverage and attention causes the name to briefly shoot up, and then the aftermath, when the name is constantly referred to as a disaster, kind of kills it off.” Basically, Amazon’s impact on the name Alexa resembles that of a natural disaster.

(When I reached out to the company, it didn’t comment on whether it had played a role in Alexa’s decline.) What Does The Name Alexa Mean The Atlantic | Data: Laura Wattenberg; Social Security Administration Alexa joins a handful of other names that were toppled by a shift in association. Perhaps the most famous is Hillary, which was in fashion in the late 1980s but fell out of style after Hillary Clinton became first lady.

Wattenberg said parents tend not to choose politicians’ names, regardless of party.) Dick lost its appeal when it was no longer primarily used as a nickname for Richard, and more recently, parents ran from the name Isis when it became connected to terrorism.
The data on baby names released by the Social Security Administration don’t indicate why parents pick or avoid particular names, but Alexa’s trajectory mirrors the adoption of smart speakers in the U.S.

Bret Kinsella, the founder of Voicebot.ai, a site that covers and analyzes data on the voice-assistant industry, told me that consumer uptake surged three years after Alexa’s release, in 2017. And the number of baby Alexas plunged below its pre-Amazon baseline in 2018—that may be when many parents started to understand the ubiquity of the name.

(Now more than 90 million American adults are estimated to have a smart speaker in their household.) Read: Alexa and the age of casual rudeness Trend lines in other countries provide further evidence that Amazon was what punctured the name Alexa’s popularity. The voice assistant’s debut in the United Kingdom (in 2016) and in Canada (in 2017) were also followed by drop-offs in baby Alexas.

(Owners can select a different “wake word” for their device so that they don’t have to say “Alexa” to get its attention, but that doesn’t much alter the name’s associations.) It is not inherently a problem for a person and a product to share a name, Wattenberg noted — for instance, Dakota and Sierra have led happy double lives as names for both humans and pickup trucks.

What’s different about Alexa is that Amazon turned it into a name for a female voice that does your bidding.
Other tech companies with voice assistants, though, have avoided annexing a popular name.
Google’s voice assistant just goes by Google, and Microsoft’s is Cortana, which is in fact a name, but a very rare one.

Meanwhile, Apple has produced a much milder version of an Alexa effect. Siri wasn’t a particularly popular name to begin with before Apple released its voice assistant, Siri, 10 years ago, but it’s become even less popular since. The number of baby Siris each year fell from 111 in 2010 to 10 in 2020.

There’s also been a drop-off in some Nordic countries, where the name is more common; last year, Denmark produced just one lone baby Siri.
Apple also did not comment on its role in the name Siri’s decline.) “We don’t usually think about the individuals who are already born when this happens, but the impact on their lives is real as well,” Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland at College Park, told me.

Sharing a name with a robot can be tiresome. “‘OMG, Siri like the iPhone,’ should be engraved on my tombstone,” complained Siri Bulusu, a journalist, in a 2016 piece about her name, And name overlaps have led to sitcom-style misunderstandings, like when, as The Wall Street Journal reported, one dad asked his daughter Alexa for some water, and their robot Alexa responded by offering to order a case of Fiji water for $27.

But Amazon’s choice of name has had much darker effects on the lives of some Alexas, particularly the younger ones who get teased at school with an onslaught of commands,
Wattenberg observed that the only Alexa that many of today’s children know is the virtual one that their family bosses around, so it’s not surprising that some of them go on to belittle classmates with the same name.

“Many parents are changing their kids’ names or using their middle names because it leads to just horrendous bullying,” she told me. When I asked Amazon if it has considered relinquishing the name Alexa, a company spokesperson did not answer that question but said, “Bullying of any kind is unacceptable, and we condemn it in the strongest possible terms.” Amazon did not exactly ruin the life of every Alexa, but the consequences of its decision seven years ago are far-reaching—roughly 127,000 American baby girls were named Alexa in the past 50 years, and more than 75,000 of them are younger than 18.

Why is Alexa’s name Ziggy?

Back 09 August 2022 What Does The Name Alexa Mean Amazon Amazon have added a new wake word for their devices in tribute to David Bowie – “Ziggy”. “Ziggy” is the fifth wake word option for Echo devices in addition to “Alexa”, “Amazon”, “Computer” and “Echo”. Customers can change the wake word of their Echo device via the Alexa app or the Settings screen on Echo Show devices, and all wake words options can be used with either the male or female voice options for Alexa.

To change Alexa’s voice, customers need to say “Alexa, change your voice.” “We are constantly looking for ways to offer our customers more choices so they can personalise their Alexa experience” said Dennis Stansbury, Alexa UK Country Manager. “The wake word is very important as Alexa devices are specially designed to only detect the users chosen wake word.

Our devices detect wake words by identifying acoustic patterns that match the wake word, so a lot of consideration goes into the selection. We chose ‘Ziggy’ not only because it performed well in testing but it’s fun and reflects Alexa’s wealth of knowledge on everything from A to Z.

As an aside, I am a self- confessed David Bowie fan so I am enjoying saying ‘Ziggy, play Ziggy’ and ‘Ziggy, play guitar’ to my Echo device!” In other Bowie-related news, the National History Museum has reported that a new group of spiders containing over 100 species has been named after the late singer.

The tropical arachnids have been named after the musician to draw attention to the threats they face. “When examining species from a predominantly Asian lineage in this family, I soon realised that they could not be assigned to any pre-existing genus,” Dr Peter Jäger said.

Is Alexa Arabic?

What Does The Name Alexa Mean At launch, the Arabic version of Alexa will be available in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The Arabic version of Alexa launched in December 2021, in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and like all new Alexa languages, it posed a unique set of challenges.

The first was to decide what forms of Arabic Alexa should speak. While the official written language in KSA and the UAE is Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), in everyday life, Arabic speakers use dialectal forms of Arabic, with many vernacular variations. For customers, engaging with Alexa in their native dialects would be more natural than speaking MSA.

So the Alexa AI team — including computational linguists — determined that Arabic Alexa would be able to understand requests in both MSA and Khaleeji (Gulf) dialects. Alexa’s speech outputs, too, would be in both MSA and a Khaleeji dialect — MSA for formal speech, such as responses to requests for information, and Khaleeji for less formal speech, such as confirmation of alarm times and music selections.

This means that someone issuing Alexa a request in one Arabic dialect might get a response in a different one.
But that mirrors the experience that Arabic speakers in the region have with each other.
The core components of a new Alexa model are automatic speech recognition ( ASR ), which converts speech into text; natural-language understanding ( NLU ), which interprets the text to initiate actions; and text-to-speech ( TTS ), which converts NLU outputs into synthesized speech.

A key question for all three components was how to render utterances textually, both as ASR output and TTS input. Written Arabic suppresses short vowel sounds: it would be sort of like spelling the English word “begin” as “bgn”. People are usually able to infer the mssng vwls frm cntxt.

But in formal and educational texts — such as reading primers for children — vowels and some consonantal sounds are indicated by diacritical marks.
So the Alexa AI team had to decide whether the ASR output should include diacritics or not.
One of the major differences between dialects is the vowel sounds, so omitting diacritics makes it easier to create a speech representation that’s applicable to all dialects, which is useful for ASR and NLU.

Moreover, there is no published writing in forms of Arabic other than MSA, so there’s no standard orthography for them, either. Asking annotators to add diacritics could introduce more ambiguity than it alleviates. In the end, the Alexa AI team decided that ASR output should use only two diacritics, the shaddah and maddah, because they help with pronunciation accuracy on entity names that pass from ASR through NLU to TTS.

Is Alexa an old name?

Modern popularity – In the United States, the name Alexa first appeared on the chart of the top 1,000 most popular baby girl names in the year 1973. It stayed in the lower ranks of the top 1000 until 1986 when it jumped from number 815 to number 431. Popularity continued to climb and Alexa was ranked in the top 100 in the mid-1990s.

Why was the name Alexa chosen?

History – Amazon Alexa devices on display in a retail store Alexa was developed out of a predecessor named Ivona which was invented in Poland, inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey and bought by Amazon in 2013. In November 2014, Amazon announced Alexa alongside the Echo.

Alexa was inspired by the computer voice and conversational system on board the Starship Enterprise in science fiction TV series and movies, beginning with Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation, Amazon developers chose the name Alexa because it has a hard consonant with the X, which helps it be recognized with higher precision.

They have said the name is reminiscent of the Library of Alexandria, which is also used by Amazon Alexa Internet for the same reason. In June 2015, Amazon announced the Alexa Fund, a program that would invest in companies making voice control skills and technologies.

The US$ 200 million fund has invested in companies including Jargon, Ecobee, Orange Chef, Scout Alarm, Garageio, Toymail, MARA, and Mojio.
In 2016, the Alexa Prize was announced to further advance the technology.
In January 2017, the first Alexa Conference took place in Nashville, Tennessee, an independent gathering of the worldwide community of Alexa developers and enthusiasts.

Follow up conferences went under the name Project Voice and featured keynote speakers such as Amazon’s Head of Education for Alexa, Paul Cutsinger. At the Amazon Web Services Re: Invent conference in Las Vegas, Amazon announced Alexa for Business and the ability for app developers to have paid add-ons to their skills.

In May 2018, Amazon announced it would include Alexa in 35,000 new homes built by Lennar, In November 2018, Amazon opened its first Alexa-themed pop-up shop inside of Toronto ‘s Eaton Centre, showcasing the use of home automation products with Amazon’s smart speakers. Amazon also sells Alexa devices at Amazon Books and Whole Foods Market locations, in addition to mall-based pop-ups throughout the United States.

In December 2018, Alexa was built into the Anki Vector and was the first major update for the Anki Vector, although Vector was released in August 2018, he is the only home robot with advanced technology. As of 2018, interaction and communication with Alexa were available only in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Hindi.

In Canada, Alexa is available in English and French (with the Quebec accent).
In October 2019, Amazon announced the expansion of Alexa to Brazil, in Portuguese, together with Bose, Intelbras, and LG,
Hoped-for revenue never materialized from people using voice ordering for Amazon products or services from partners like Domino’s Pizza and Uber,

Alexa does not play audio ads, and display ads were relatively unsuccessful. In 2019 an all-hands crisis meeting was called to address the issue, and a hiring freeze was instated. In 2022, with the division losing several billion dollars per quarter, the company started laying off Alexa employees en masse.

Who’s smarter Siri or Alexa?

Which One Is Smarter: Alexa, Google, or Siri? – It should be no surprise that Google Assistant gives more detailed and informative replies, given Google’s extensive history of using its search engine to answer questions. In a study, researchers recently asked 800 questions to each smart assistant, and Google Assistant aced the test with a perfect score of 100% comprehension and a 93% accuracy rate,

Siri performed poorly on the same exam, getting only 83% of the questions right.
Siri was superior to Google Assistant regarding requests like sending a text, playing music, adding a meeting to your calendar, and more.
Alexa scored the lowest of all exam takers, achieving a final score of 80%.
Amazon, however, increased Alexa’s question-answering proficiency by 18% between 2018 and 2019.

Alexa also outperformed Siri in a more recent test, with 100% accuracy, The Google Assistant came out on top after being compared to two other intelligent assistants.

Can Alexa remember your name?

Amazon’s Alexa can sometimes misunderstand or misinterpret you when you speak to your Echo device, If you live in a household with other Amazon users, the voice assistant may also have trouble figuring out which person is speaking. Thankfully, there’s a solution.

You can train Alexa to better recognize you by creating a Voice ID.
After you set up your ID, Alexa can call you by your name and deliver personalized results based on your voice.
Alexa can even distinguish your voice from those of other people in the house.
Adults, teenagers, and children can all create a voice profile.

Let’s check out how.

What is the #1 female name?

Top 5 Names in Each of the Last 100 Years

	Females
Year	Rank 1	Rank 2
2019	Olivia	Emma
2018	Emma	Olivia
2017	Emma	Olivia

What is a rarest girl name?

What is the rarest girl name? – One of the rarest girl names is Elora, because it’s low on the popularity charts, but there are several rare girl names including Hadleigh and Ophelia, Some parents even decide to create an entirely new name based on a place they love, a family member, or one with other cultural significance.

What is Alexa female?

“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.
Ennedy 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.
Ennedy 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.

Why is she called Alexa?

By Seattle Times business reporter About 4,250 Alexas are turning five in the U.S. this year. One of them is Amazon’s. The voice-computing technology that can now control more than 85,000 different devices debuted Nov.6, 2014. Some 10,000 people work at Amazon on various parts of the system of technologies, which is used by “tens of millions” of customers each month, according to a company blog post marking its birthday. What Does The Name Alexa Mean “As the Alexa device becomes more ubiquitous, Alexa baby girls will become less so,” said Pamela Redmond, co-founder of baby names site Nameberry, Thousands of other babies each year are named variants such as Alexandra and Alexis, the latter peaking as the third-most-popular female baby name in 1999.

The arrival of the voice-computing system and its microphone-equipped device has been a mild annoyance for some of the other Alexas.
One writes on Nameberry that she loves her name, but wishes everyone called her Lexi now.
Meeting anyone under the age of 12 or over the age 45 means them saying, ‘Oh, like Amazon Alexa’ after I introduce myself.” Pop culture influences baby naming trends, but not always in predictable ways, Redmond said.

“Kylo as in Kylo Ren was one of the fastest-rising names last year even though the character was not strictly positive,” she said. Indeed, Kylo Ren kills his father in 2015’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” Nevertheless, the name entered the top 1,000 male baby names in 2016, climbing to 865 in 2018.

Amazon named its voice-computing technology Alexa as an homage to the Library of Alexandria, a company spokeswoman said.
Amazon also controls the name commercially, having acquired Alexa Internet, which ranks websites by traffic and provides marketing tools, in 1999, and which was also named to honor the Egyptian library, an important storehouse of knowledge in the ancient world.

More than 50 humans named Alexa currently work at Amazon, according to LinkedIn. Alexa ended up with a female voice and persona, Amazon executives have said, because that’s what customers preferred in early voice testing. The company so far has not offered the option of a male-voiced assistant.

If your name IS Alexa, this is worth noting: The “wake word” that activates the device can be changed to Echo, Amazon, or computer, evoking the ambient voice-controlled computer system from Star Trek that Alexa is modeled on. That option is apparently not available yet on every Alexa-enabled device, however.

“I just got my Echo Auto and after setting it up realized I couldn’t change the wake word the same way I have changed my other devices in the house,” one person wrote on Amazon’s device forum in September, “My daughter’s name is Alexa, so not being able to change it is really a deal breaker for me.” Other female-identified digital assistants have much less common names.

Siri, the name given to the Apple assistant that debuted in 2011 and Cortana, which Microsoft unveiled in 2014, were highly unusual names to begin with, Redmond said.
They’ve become less popular since: 20 baby girls were named Siri in the U.S.
In 2018 and five were named Cortana, Redmond said.
Alexa was first heard in a commercial on Nov.6, 2014 on YouTube.

Multiple parodies that replaced Alexa’s voice quickly followed. Amazon later took down the ad. YouTube user Smart Home uploaded the original commercial in 2016. Introducing Amazon Echo – YouTube Smart Home 42 subscribers Introducing Amazon Echo Watch later Share Copy link Info Shopping Tap to unmute If playback doesn’t begin shortly, try restarting your device.