There’s no shortage of parents who failed to think through their kids’ names before signing the birth certificate. The kid in the year above at school called Poppy Field; the elderly neighbour called Stan Still. As a child, I spent a lot of time laughing with friends at those misfortunate enough to end up with a dodgy name. I never expected to end up with one myself.
For years, I was perfectly happy being called Alexa. Granted, no one had really heard of it before. Apart from my name never being spelt correctly at Starbucks, I was rarely troubled by it. Then, in 2014, Amazon had the wonderful idea to bounce off Apple’s successes with Siri and produce their own virtual assistant, the Amazon echo, accompanied by its wake word, ‘Alexa’. Here is where my plight began.
It started small.
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