The good and geeky reasons Amazon chose the name 'Alexa' for its app
Aside from the technicalities of voice control, Star Trek also played a part in the decision

The dream that drove Amazon engineers to invent its voice service, Alexa, was driven by Star Trek.
The Alexa App is a companion to Amazon's Echo speaker, which allows it to work off of voice control.
They were trying to replicate the "computer" in Star Trek, which always answered and worked when any Star Trek crew simply called out the word "computer," David Limp, the vice president in charge of Amazon Devices told attendees at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado, on Tuesday.
The problem was choosing a word that people didn't ordinarily use in everyday life. "Computer" wouldn't cut it. So after testing various names, the team landed on a word Alexa, that used soft vowels and an "x." It sounded fairly unique.
But the engineers also liked the name for that somewhat geeky Star Trek-ish reason. It was "a little reminiscent of the library of Alexander" which was at one time the keeper of "all knowledge," Limp said.
The idea was you could ask Alexa anything, and it would know and answer.