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It's sort of wild to think that Amazon purchased Alexa.com in 1999 for ~$250M in stock, and that stock would be worth more than $7B today, if my math is correct
by cobrabyte 5y ago
It's sort of wild to think that Amazon purchased Alexa.com in 1999 for ~$250M in stock, and that stock would be worth more than $7B today, if my math is correct.
Bought a website ranking company, used the company's name as the name of a consumer electronics assistant, and then shuttered the company 22 years later to (presumably) be able to use the domain name for more consumer electronics.
- fault1 5y agoIn essense, what the original Alexa did seems to have been internalized into Amazon ads (or their b2b analytics division), which is coincidently the fastest growing part of Amazon. Wonder why they used the Alexa name for their home assistant.
- oblio 5y agoShort, international, neutral name, somewhat easy to pronounce in many languages.
- gonehome 5y agoIt's also phonetically recognizable and distinct. It's one of the reasons you have to say "Hey Google" or "Hey Siri", but you're able to just say "Alexa" I find Siri the worst one for that, it often triggers on "serious".
- sanedigital 5y agoIf our Google Home triggers accidentally its usually easy to think back on what we said and find the offending phrase. Siri, on the other hand, seems to trigger several times a day without any explanation.
- mattkrause 5y agoI wonder if the problem is the /s/ sound at the beginning of Siri. Since it's a fricative, it sounds like the hissing noise produced by other kinds of turbulent flow.
- DonHopkins 5y agoIt's ok, you can just say "fart".
- mwcampbell 5y agoExcept that when my business partner and I are talking to each other about Alexa, we have to refer to it indirectly, e.g. "the A-lady", to avoid triggering his Alexa devices (I don't normally have one active).
- amysox 5y agoAs mentioned above, to my roommate and me, it's "the A bitch." :D
- lastofthemojito 5y agoThe nice thing about "OK Google" was that it sounded a lot like "Cocaine Poodle", so you could imagine your personal assistant was a hyperactive creature of limited intelligence. Which honestly, sets expectations appropriately.
- dougmwne 5y agoI would like to briefly visit your reality.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoYou can find a dealer at a corner near you X-)
- ISL 5y ago"Hay Poodle" seems, if not quite as good, to be in the same spirit.
- romwell 5y agoMy favorite command is: "Obey, Booble! Bind my bone!" Which is close enough to make Google find my phone :D
- chadlavi 5y agonot sure if it's still the case, but in a similar vein you used to be able to say "hey booboo" to google devices
- 5y ago
- gumby 5y agoMy watch’s Siri seems to trigger when washing my hands, or sometimes when I am in the kitchen and somebody else opens the tap. I was on a zoom call the other day, both of us using speaker (no headsets) and something trigger both our watches to say, “sorry, I didn’t get that”, in each of our languages. At least we both laughed.
- jen729w 5y agoMine too, but I think you’re probably holding down the crown in the physical action of the washing. Your hands are bent in unusual ways and the back of your hand pushes up against the crown. I don’t think it’s responding to a vocal ‘Hey, Siri!’ in this case.
- newsbinator 5y agoMy “Hey Siri” triggers on the first attempt 25% of the time (neutral North American accent). I wonder if it’s a slow wake-from-sleep issue or something.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoIt works pretty much 100% here and I have a Dutch accent with Irish influences :) What kind of hardware do you use? Homepod or phone?
- newsbinator 5y agoOld (supported) iPhone
- userbinator 5y ago"Let's, uhh..." is a pretty common sentence starter in conversation and has been observed to trigger Alexa before.
- amysox 5y agoYes, this is why we can't talk about Alexa at home. My roommate and I, if we're not talking to it, refer to it as "the A bitch." :D
- Retric 5y agoIt’s also been a popular name for decades, http://www.ourbabynamer.com/Alexa-name-popularity.html http://www.ourbabynamer.com/Alexa-name-popularity.html. IMO, picking one of the most common US names for a voice assistant and then skipping the wake up phrase is dumb.
- judge2020 5y ago> one of the most common US names With ~125k total names since the 1940's, it's not really close to one of the most common in the US; just one that was in the top 100 for 2 decades.
- ghaff 5y agoI'd say top 100 for about the last 25 years makes it pretty common. What surprises me a bit is that it didn't fall off a cliff after Amazon's Alexa came out.
- rightbyte 5y ago"Alexa" seems to have fallen of a cliff since Amazon's device, though. If this site is accurate: https://nameberry.com/babyname/Alexa https://nameberry.com/babyname/Alexa "Alexandra" seems way more common than "Alexa".
- afavour 5y agoYeah I have a friend called Alexa and it absolutely infuriates her. Can't say I blame her.
- VRay 5y agoAt least you can change the wake word on Amazon devices All Apple devices interpret "Hey Sarah" as "Hey Siri" and then start shooting their stupid mouths off, bugs the hell out of Sarah
- enos_feedler 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Brendinooo 5y ago>Early on, the team realized they needed a "wake word" that would make the device start listening. The word would need to have three syllables, a "distinct combination of phonemes" so as not to unnecessarily rouse the device, and an easily marketable name, like Apple's Siri. https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/news/here-are-the-other-names-jeff-bezos-pitched-for-alexa-including-samantha-and-friday-and-amazon/ar-BB1gHn43 https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/news/here-are-the-other-name...
- thedailymail 5y agoThis just struck me, and I don't know if it's true, but a-lex could be a play on Greek and Latin for "not" and "written." Which is a pretty good name for a voice-based input system.
- albert_e 5y agoLex is the name of the AWS service that provides NLP based chatbot functionality It is what drives A-lex-a under the hood. https://aws.amazon.com/lex/ https://aws.amazon.com/lex/ In addition it uses another AWS service called Polly that generates speech from text.
- throwmeaway128 5y agoYou have the order of creation wrong. AWS Lex, Polly, and Transcribe began as forks of Alexa's NLU, TTS (which was an aquisition called Ivona), and ASR components. Source: I worked for Alexa at the time.
- trevcanhuman 5y agoOh, now I’m confused. I thought this was about the Alexa assistant product. Seems from other comments that this company provides web analysis.
- rockostrich 5y agoAccording to my former manager who worked on the Alexa team at one point, it was a name with a high true-positive rate for their voice recognition system.
- savoytruffle 5y agoThey'd already cleared the trademark!
- barbazoo 5y agoDid they just have extreme foresight about wanting the domain alexa.com or were they genuinely interested in alexa.com as a product? They kept it around for 22 years after all but I can't see how what alexa.com used to do has anything to do with what amazon is doing.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoForesight? Or just picked Alexa because they happened to have the domain and it's a good brand name for this?
- barbazoo 5y agoGood point. But then I wonder why they bought it in the first place.
- Thorrez 5y agoI'm pretty sure they were interested in the company as a product.
- neworbit 5y agoThey bought it for data gathering and market/competitor research. I was with Amazon at the time. Was great for keeping track of what products were drawing most traction on eBay (Longaberger baskets and Beanie babies, says my vague memory)
- totoglazer 5y ago10 Billion. Honestly seems kind of low? I guess in SPY that would be only $650m, so definitely beating the benchmark.
- Thorrez 5y agoThey don't need to shutter the company to reuse the domain. They could have moved the company to alexarank.com .