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I feel the exact opposite. "Alexa" feels like a very clunky attempt to humanise something that isn't human.

• bsenftner 9y ago
  My first reaction was "a Russian name?" That's curious...
• dionidium 9y ago
  And "OK, Google" is a really clunky attempt to convince me that I'm having a conversation, when I'm clearly not. It's cringe-worthy, even. It sets off all kinds of, "a programmer nerd made this and thinks this totally abnormal phrase is how real people talk" alarm bells. It's actually embarrassing to say out loud, even if you're alone.
• dilap 9y ago
  we give names to all sorts of creatures that aren't human -- ships, pets, gods, &c. there's a large part of our brain that is basically hard-coded to interact with things assuming they are people-ish, with names and autonomous behaviors. alexa and google home are still super-primitive, but as they get more sophisticated, thinking of them as people will seem like the most natural thing in the world. (i do get where you're coming from, but i think it's a perspective that only makes sense for (1) the very technical and (2) is not long for this world.) (it's sort of analogous to how originally in internet search engines, you had to put in very precise search terms, and unsophisticated people would just put in some sort of sloppy natural language query. but as the search engines got smarter, the precise stuff got ignored and sloppy was the way to go.)