When a bot shares your name: how Amazon made girls called Alexa a target of teasing and even sexual harassment

The moment Jennifer Clark realised that Amazon’s Alexa was ruining her eight-year-old daughter’s life was in July when her kid came home from Bible camp, an experience the child had been looking forward to for months.

“I happened to have Amazon open on my laptop and was shopping. She saw the name Alexa on my screen,” Clark recalls, referring to an ad for the Amazon Echo device. Her daughter said, “‘That’s my name. I don’t like it. They are always teasing me’,” Clark says.

“‘They are always pretending I’m the Alexa machine.’ And she started crying. I don’t know how long she was holding onto it,” Clark says.

It was a heartbreaking moment for Clark, but even so, she didn’t realise the full extent of what her daughter was going through as a result of sharing a name with Amazon’s popular software bot, Alexa. The Amazon smart speaker device that features Alexa was released in 2014, when the child was three, and no one knew then what a worldwide phenomenon it would become.

At first, Clark, who is an educator with a background in child development, just put the camp teasing story down to kids being kids.

But then she started to pay attention and saw the relentless nature of the teasing. It wasn’t just the kids at camp. It was kids and adults everywhere: the kids at school, her daughter’s teacher, adults at the store if Clark called out her daughter’s name, and so on.

“It slammed me in the face,” Clark recalls. This isn’t just a bit of teasing. “This is a whole different level.”

And she’s not alone. A father named his four-year-old daughter Alexa to honour his grandfather, Alexander. At that point the Amazon Echo device featuring Alexa software had only been around for a little over a year. But in the past year, “we have been amazed at the speed and popularity of the device”, he says, asking that his name be withheld to protect his family’s privacy.

He and his wife first became “slightly concerned after a visit to Santa in the local department store, which was a big thing for our daughter, and he spent the whole time laughing at her and asking if she does what she is told”, the dad says.

The problem is that Amazon chose a very popular name for its artificially intelligent machine with a woman’s voice.

Other tech companies with similar virtual assistant products opted for names like Cortana, Google Assistant and Bixby. But Amazon chose a human name that in the previous decade was among the top 75, and sometimes the top 50, baby names in the English-speaking world. There were tens of thousands of kids already out there named Alexa.

At at time when tech companies are under fierce scrutiny for abusing user privacy, spreading misinformation on their platforms and designing addictive products, the outcry over a name might seem like a minor grievance. But for the people affected by the shared name, Amazon’s actions and seeming indifference to the real-world consequences, is a very personal, and never-ending reminder of the power the tech industry holds over our lives.

Another mum, Lauren Johnson, grew so angry and fed up that she wrote an impassioned essay to Jeff Bezos in November 2018, called “Alexa Is a Human”, in which she shared the story of how her own six-year-old child was having her life shaped from being bullied over her name, coming home from school daily in tears.

When people learn her daughter’s name, “most people, nine out of 10 times, say something. It really is that big of a deal”, Johnson says.

The name Alexa has become synonymous with “servant”, Johnson says. “If we had named our child Servant, we’d be all over the news.”

After CNBC and NBC New York wrote about the letter in 2018, other people named Alexa, as well as other parents, started reaching out to Johnson. The letter has become a website and the website is now a cross between a support site and a social action group.

Despite her appeals to Amazon, the company has not reached out to the group. How bad is it? The ordinary corny joke level teasing (“Alexa, do this or that”) has taken a dark turn, as some people named Alexa say that they are experiencing sexual harassment.

One 18-year-old high schooler named Alexa said that, in addition to the usual Alexa do-this-or-that jokes that come from everybody all the time, the boys at school have started teasing her by asking her to do sexual favours in the same tone: “Alexa, give me a –” she says.

This teen says she’s old enough and strong enough to handle the typical kind of teasing and tries to let it roll off her back. She also says she knows she’s not the only girl to be harassed because of her name. Girls at school with names in songs get the same kind of abuse, she says.

The difference is that a song’s popularity comes and goes, but Alexa is now everywhere and its popularity in devices only seems to be growing.

Amazon is determined to put the Alexa assistant everywhere, extending well beyond smart speakers to clocks, microwave ovens and even glasses.

“There is no reason not to put them everywhere in your house,” Amazon executive David Limp told The New York Times in September.

And with that comes double entendres. For instance, when plumbing manufacturers released smart shower heads and waterproof speakers, the headlines immediately went to “Would You Invite Alexa Into the Shower?” and “Alexa, take a shower with me!”

These are not the kinds of remarks parents of young girls, or even adult women, want to be battling with all day, every day.

“I can handle myself. I didn’t grow up with this,” says the 18-year-old Alexa, who asked that we do not share her last name. But she adds, she’s angry and heartbroken for the little girls dealing with this.

“It’s a nice name. And it shouldn’t have been taken. It makes me so angry, that they would take a good, popular name,” she says. “A lot of children will be bullied for this. They are being bullied already.”

The name has become so vilified that “I just read an article about baby naming which compared the name Alexa to Bin Laden”, says Johnson.

As to why Amazon chose Alexa for the name of its AI device, Limp has previously said the name is “a little reminiscent of the library of Alexander”, which was at one time the keeper of “all knowledge”.

He says the Amazon team also chose the name because they believed it was a word people didn’t use much and believed the soft vowels coupled with an “x” made the name sound fairly unique as a wake word.

Amazon also already owned a company bought many years before called Alexa Internet (still in operation today), founded by Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle. That company was also named after the library of Alexander, Kahle once told Recode, although Limp has said that there was no connection that caused Amazon to name its AI the same name as the Amazon-owned company.

The parents worked with the three-year old to choose a new name. She’s young enough to roll with it, telling her family: “You can call me Aria now,” and if her dad forgets, she says, “Silly Daddy, I’m not Alexa, I’m Aria now”.

But legally changing a name involves weeks of paperwork. “You have to jump through a lot of hoops,” the mum says. And doing so for an older child already enrolled in school is even harder.

The 18-year-old says that she doesn’t want to change her name. She likes it and it’s part of her identity.

Neither Johnson nor Clark, whose kids are of school age, want to legally change their daughters’ names either. Johnson and her daughter have slowly been using a new nickname, Lexi, at least around people who don’t know her as Alexa. And the Clarks also “made the financial sacrifice” to place their daughter in a private school where teasing is not allowed, hoping to protect her better, Clark says.