“It is a good name, good reference, and they own it.” Kahle, one of the founders of the domain ranking Alexa, told The Outline he wasn’t sure why Amazon might have chosen to give another product the same name as the company he started - though he did appreciate the homage to the Library of Alexandria. And now, with a growing line of Echo devices on the market, it’s become a catch-all for the entire system - a trend Amazon has leaned into by emphasizing the Alexa brand in its marketing.Īmazon didn’t respond to a request for comment. But by the following summer, customers had started to refer to Alexa as if it were a person, according to the company. The landing page that first announced the device, for instance, used the word “Alexa” only twice. Initial publicity for Amazon’s digital assistant focused on the Echo itself, the plastic cylinder that connects to the cloud-based Alexa. The Surface name was repurposed for its tablet. Microsoft had a product called the Surface which was renamed the PixelSense. It’s almost like a parent giving a newborn the same name as an older child - though, to be fair, that’s never stopped George Foreman, the celebrity boxer and self-described “grillionaire” who named all five of his sons George. Then, more than a decade later, it made the branding decision to call its digital assistant Alexa even though it could have chosen any name. But instead, it was the opposite: First Amazon purchased the website ranking Alexa. It would make sense if Amazon had launched its own service called Alexa and subsequently made the strategic decision to acquire a company that happened to have the same name. That’s the really puzzling thing about the two Alexas. It’s unclear whether a corporation the size of Amazon has ever simultaneously offered two products with the same name, though when Microsoft released its Surface series of tablets in 2012 it borrowed the name from its much-lampooned $10,000 touchscreen table, originally released in 2007, which it then renamed the PixelSense. In those cases, though, the brands almost invariably have different owners. Marketers use the term “brand twins” to describe the phenomenon in which pairs of unrelated brands share an identical or nearly-identical name, like Domino’s Pizza and Domino Sugar. “Not any connection,” he said, with a terse smile. In a rare exception, an interviewer last year asked Dave Limp, a senior Amazon vice president who oversees Alexa, whether there was any tie between the name of the digital assistant and the analytics company. The press has seldom made a connection between the two. “Amazon is so big and has so many subsidiaries that most employees don’t know stuff about other parts of the company.” - an Amazon employee who worked on the Alexa home assistant Though both are prominently branded as Amazon properties, neither the landing page that served as an announcement of the upcoming Echo in 2014 nor the balmy promotional video that accompanied its market launch mentioned the other Amazon service that had long carried the same moniker. Amazon’s Echo smart home device, which is powered by a digital assistant with the default name “Alexa.” Bloomberg via Getty Imagesįor the sake of clarity, let’s call the pair “website ranking Alexa” and “digital assistant Alexa.” The names of both brands were reportedly inspired by the ancient Egyptian Library of Alexandria, and the designers of the digital assistant Alexa were particularly drawn to the word’s hard “X” consonant, which is easy for speech recognition algorithms to identify.
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