Name-dropping: The number of babies named Alexa is dropping quickly

Name-dropping: The number of babies named Alexa is dropping quickly

11/20/22 7:00PM

Last week Amazon commenced its layoffs, with 10,000 employees set to lose their jobs — the largest cuts in the company’s history.

‍Name-dropping

‍The cuts hit the Alexa voice assistant division especially hard. One employee in Alexa’s AI division reported that 60% of her team were being cut, with a 15-minute videoconference informing them of their unemployment.

Amazon are not the only ones scaling back on Alexa — parents are too. Last year only 698 baby girls were named Alexa in the US, the lowest figure since 1986. The name exploded in popularity in the 90s and early 2000s, but lost steam during the last decade, particularly after Amazon released its voice assistant in 2014-15.

‍Alexa, what should I call my startup?

‍Though Amazon Echo is technically the actual device, the naming of Alexa is interesting. Asking a device to play music, set a timer or call mom becomes much more natural when the device is anthropomorphized with a human name — and it’s not only Amazon that uses this technique. Goldman Sachs' consumer arm is named Marcus, there's mattress companies Emma &Casper, an AI copywriting tool called Jasper, an insurance startup named Oscar, Mona is a personal shopping assistant and Billie is a buy-now-pay-later company for the B2B market.

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The most watched soccer match in US history got less than a third of the views the Super Bowl did

Between a top-spot finish in the group stage, a sweeping performance against Bosnia and Herzegovina in the round of 32, and the president’s controversial intervention, Monday evening’s USMNT game against Belgium had, to put it lightly, shaped up into a box-office clash.

And though the US players’ performance on the pitch might not have lived up to the high drama off it, American soccer fans certainly showed up. According to early estimates, the 4-1 defeat against Belgium was the most watched soccer telecast in US history, hauling some 40 million viewers on average across the coverage on Fox and Telemundo.

That may be a record tally in the US for the sport that much of the world calls some variant of “football” — besting the 36.2 million who tuned in to watch the team’s previous knock-out match — but it’s still peanuts in comparison to the sport that shares the same name in the States.

World cup viewers chart — Sherwood News

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