Yeah, they call the activation word a "wake word", but I couldn't help but think of it as a "safe word". It needs to be something that you're only likely to say

Yeah, they call the activation word a "wake word", but I couldn't help but think of it as a "safe word". It needs to be something that you're only likely to say when you mean it. Which, to me, implies it should be customizable. I should be able to set it to whatever makes sense for me. This issue comes up in science fiction stories, often set on spacecraft, where there is an AI that is spoken to. On Star Trek, they just said "Computer?" and that got it's attention. But that always seemed a little clunky to me. At first I thought the ship AI should have the same name as the ship, but I quickly realized that probably wouldn't work so well. Picard: "This is the USS Enterprise!" Computer: "Yes?" On Babylon 5, a Minbari character just called his ship, "ship", and in Alien, the ship was Mother, etc. I decided that if I ever wrote an SF story with a shipboard AI (or HAD a ship with a shipboard AI :) I would call it Maru-san.