When clients utter her name, a lady who shares her name with the smart electronic devices Alexa and Siri says she regularly sets them off during online meetings.
Alexa Seary, 27, is a 27-year-old woman whose surname is pronounced Siri and shares her name with popular Amazon and Apple products.
Since the introduction of Apple’s personal assistant function, Siri, in 2011, she has been the butt of many jokes. But she couldn’t believe it when Amazon unveiled its own human-like bot, the Amazon Echo, in 2014 and named it Alexa.
Alexa was in her early twenties and working in a restaurant where people were continually laughing at her name and giving her commands like a machine. Alexa, who now works in pharmaceutical marketing, says the jokes have gone down, and she thinks her name is “cool.”
“I like my name – it’s like a trademark. But I’m constantly setting off people’s Alexa’s in their homes when they say my name in meetings. I feel terrible when it’s a client call, and they are all embarrassed. I thought sharing my surname with Siri was cool as a kid,” Alexa said.
“When Alexa came out, it went a little crazy and got a little annoying. Now I use it as an icebreaker. The odds of sharing my name with Alexa and Siri are pretty crazy,” she added.
People, according to Alexa, are always fast to recognize the connection with her first name, but they don’t always recognize the ‘Siri’ link until she says her name aloud. “At first, people really do not twig the Siri link,” she explained.
“As a server in the restaurant, I’d get tables messing with me. I go over to introduce myself, and they’d laugh and say – ‘I have one of those.’
“When they’d ask for things, they would say – ‘Alexa, get me this.’ I still get that joke.”
Alexa now utilizes her name as an icebreaker and considers it a good thing. “It’s quite fitting now that I work in social media marketing,” she remarked.
“It’s like my stage name. I think it’s cool and unique. It gets pointed out in emails all the time.
“People always ask me if my parents knew when they named me, but they can’t tell the future. I think I’ll keep the name Seary in my surname when I get married.”
When Alexa meets individuals with the same first name, she is always empathetic.
“We’ve got that shared common ground,” she said.
