The Atlantic: Amazon Has Killed the Name Alexa for Humanity

A recent article from the Atlantic outlines how the name Alexa has become so synonymous with Amazon’s personal assistant that the number of children being named Alexa is plummeting.

The Atlantic reports in an article titled “Amazon Killed the Name Alexa,” that following the release of Amazon’s voice assistant device Alexa, the popularity of the name Alexa for newbord babies has dropped drastically. According to the website Namerology, Alexa is unique in being one of the sharpest drops in popularity in baby names in recent times.

The Atlantic writes:

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.)

Amazon Alexa devices have become commonplace in many homes around the world, resulting in the theory that a key reason for avoiding the name when naming a child is to avoid activating the home assistant device when calling out a child’s name.

Amazon Alexa devices have faced a number of security issues in recent years, in 2020 Breitbart News reported that a security report revealed that Alexa’s web services featured a bug that hackers could have exploited to grab a user’s entire voice history including all of their recorded audio interactions with Alexa.

Amazon patched the flaw, but the vulnerability could have provided hackers with profile information such as a user’s home address and “skills” or app that they had added to Alexa. Hackers could also have deleted an existing Alexa skill and replaced it with a malicious one to grab more user data.

In June of this year, Breitbart News reported that Amazon was introducing a new feature that will turn existing Alexa, Echo, and other devices into a wireless mesh network that can provide nearby neighbors with access to the user’s internet connection. Read more about how to disable the feature at Breitbart News here.

Read more about the decline of the name Alexa at the Atlantic here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com