It might seem like news The World Today, but is not. According to what they say in BBC News, a large group of parents is asking Amazon to change the name of their assistant due to the continuous pranks their daughters make at school. The problem is being called the same as the Amazon assistant, something that could be banal but hides a serious problem for small ones.
The problem with being called Alexa
Taking into account that Amazon's assistant works like a real butler at your service, calling you in the same way should not be a dish of good taste, especially if you are young and surround yourself with very joking friends. That is what is happening to many girls in the UK, where more than 4.000 people under the age of 25 are called Alexa.
According to the testimony of Heather (fictitious name to maintain anonymity), her daughter Alexa began to endure continuous jokes from her classmates who did not stop joking with her name referring to the Amazon assistant. Little Alexa's experience was so traumatic that her parents were forced to legally change her name and change her school to start a new phase.
According to what they say, not only the children made the jokes, since even a teacher dared to drop the easy joke related to the assistant. And of course, sometimes we are not aware of how vulnerable and fragile the little ones are, and everything led to a change in the girl's behavior, trying to avoid going to class and becoming violent.
Another of the testimonies speaks of a 6-year-old girl who is already enduring the same teasing, and her parents assure that the situation is affecting the confidence of the young.
A disused name
The Alexa name problem is not limited to the United Kingdom, since in the United States and other European countries it is also very common to find the name of Alexa. But it will be less and less. In 2016, the name was at number 167 of popular names, and in 2019 it plummeted to number 920.
Is Amazon changing Alexa's name?
Amazon has already spoken about the problems that the name of its assistant is causing, and ensures that “we designed our voice assistant to reflect the qualities that we value in people: being intelligent, considerate, empathetic and inclusive. We are saddened by the experiences you have shared and want to be very clear: bullying of any kind is unacceptable and we condemn it in the strongest possible terms."
Obviously Amazon is not going to change the name of its famous assistant, and as an excuse to point out that you can change Alexa's name to something else from the settings of the Echo and the virtual assistant, so technically it is not an imposed name. Seen from Amazon's side, would footballers, singers and popular characters also have to change their names if they are mocked by other people?
I had already imagined something similar, it is that to put the name they did not think it was a better solution to put a name that is not proper to people