At one point, in the US there were over 100,000 people named Alexa, which gained popularity after singer Billy Joel and model Christie Brinkley named their daughter Alexa in 1985. After Amazon chose Alexa as its voice service’s wake word, its name’s popularity was no longer the same. My wife jokes that I live with an extended family of digital assistants — Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant — besides subscriptions to three chatbots — ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. Names, of course, matter.
Dale Carnegie wasn’t off the mark when he wrote in his How to Win Friends and Influence People: “Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”
Chatbots have so far proved to be clumsy to a degree and digital assistants are undergoing a makeover but one thing that tech companies have got it right are names.
Take the case of Apple’s Siri. The computer engineer Dag Kittlaus, who helped create the digital assistant, said the name was inspired by the Norse meaning of “beautiful victory.” After Apple acquired it in 2010, Steve Jobs didn’t warm up to the name but since nobody could agree on anything better, the Cupertino company decided that any change would be futile.
Google went out of its comfort zone to come up with Bard, its chatbot. Bard has a Shakespearean ring to it and it’s better than naming a chatbot after itself: Remember how Google insisted that you address its voice-controlled Google Assistant with “OK Google”?! Of course, nothing gold can stay, so in February Google gave Bard a new identity — Gemini.
Dag Kittlaus
Gemini lacks the punch of Bard but it still reflects the versatility of Google’s AI offerings. If not anything else, it reminds us of the 10 crewed missions of the Gemini programme.
On the other hand, OpenAI named its chatbot ChatGPT. Instead of humanising the chatbot, the company ensured the name doesn’t hold up to cultural scrutiny. Had OpenAI big boss Sam Altman known that the chatbot would have immense influence beyond the tech world, he would have called it something sensible. “It’s a horrible name, but it may be too ubiquitous to ever change,” Altman told comedian Trevor Noah during a podcast.
A good name always helps technology grow; Siri is a good example. The same goes for Microsoft’s AI suite Copilot. A cleverly devised name, Copilot suggests that it cannot work without the user. A pilot is powerful but having a copilot means, helping go beyond limitations. If that doesn’t impress you, here’s a fact: Internally, it took shape in the form of “Sydney”.
Haiku to Opus
Anthropic, which has been formed by a few former OpenAI employees and is attracting a good deal of funding, calls its bot, Claude. The French name, originating from the Latin name Claudius, is usually given to boys. But there aren’t too many Claudes out there: according to US census data, it hasn’t been in the top 200 boys names since the 1940s. Further, it moves away from the trend of having female-sounding names, like Alexa.
Anthropic has been careful with its naming strategy of its different AI models — Haiku represents the smallest model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet represents the middle model in the lineup and Opus is reserved for its highest-end model.
Another new model is Grok, an AI model introduced by X, which the company said is inspired by the book The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, though the term comes from Robert Heinlein’s 1961 sci-fi novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. According to xAI: “Grok is an AI modeled after The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask! Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humour!” Yes, Grok has some level of wit but when it comes to accuracy, it still has a lot to prove.
Perhaps a better name is Watson; there is heft to it. IBM’s goal has always been to push the frontiers of science and burnish IBM’s reputation. The company presented a bet with its chess-playing Deep Blue computer, which beat the world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. In a nod to the earlier project, the scientists originally called their AI computer DeepJ but the marketing team stepped in and decided to name the machine for IBM’s chairman, Thomas Watson Sr. When Watson triumphed at Jeopardy!, the response presented big business opportunities.
At the moment, all eyes are on Siri, which is receiving a new coat of polish with the upcoming Apple Intelligence. Let’s see if Siri can live up to expectations.
Mathures Paul
