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Fewer parents name baby girls Alexa after Amazon Echo debut

Naming your daughter after a voice assistant isn’t catching on — in fact, just the opposite has occurred. Since 2015 when Amazon introduced the Echo smart speaker with its now ubiquitous “Alexa” wake-up command, the incidence of newborn girls named Alexa has tumbled, Recode reports.

In 2015, Recode says, 6,050 baby girls were named Alexa. According to statistics from the Social Security Administration analyzed by Philip Cohen, a sociology professor from the University of Maryland, 33 percent fewer parents — just 3,883 — named their baby girls Alexa in 2017. The name dropped from 311 of every 100,000 baby girls in 2015 to 207 per 100,000 female babies in 2017.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told the world how the name for Amazon Echo device’s cloud-based voice assistant originated in 2016 during a public interview at the Washington Post’s Transformers Conference, USA Today reports.

Bezos said he and his friends pretended to be Star Trek characters, playing in their elementary school years. A talking computer crew members addressed as “Alexa” in the Star Trek series was Bezos’ inspiration when the time came to decide on a name for the Echo voice assistant.