The name Alexa has become synonymous with smart home for hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Amazon’s voice assistant can play music, draw curtains, turn on the TV, or turn on lights.
British and American parents of girls, also named Alexa, ran out of patience. As the portal pointed out BBC, especially in childhood, they go through hell because of it. Peers and adults shout orders at them as if talking to a computer Alex.
“My daughter’s children say, ‘Alex, go to the disco. Or we were in the park and all the boys were giving her homework there all the time. She’s completely confined, I think it affects her self-esteem. Adults make fun of her, too.’ , “said the mother of a six-year-old girl.
Another Alexa struggled with similar ridicule in high school. “Because of the jokes and bullying, she stopped introducing herself to her name. Even the teachers dug into it and the school didn’t do anything about it. We had to put her in another school where it was much better,” her mother said, adding that her daughter was on the verge of psychological collapse.
Adult women also suffer
Adult women also have problems. Alexa from Hamburg, Germany, hears allusions to her name at work almost every day. “When I present something to colleagues, someone always comes up with it. It’s awful,” she confided.
Lauren Johnson has launched a campaign called Alexa is a man she wants to help bullied girls and women. Dozens of parents have also called on Amazon to change the name of its voice assistant. Users can do this themselves and address it as “computer”, for example, but most of them do not know about it.
However, Alexa is not the only one, Apple’s assistant Siri causes the same trouble, although less often. Siri is an abbreviation of the name Sigrid, which is used in Norway, Sweden and the Faroe Islands.
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