Women and girls across the nation are lamenting the notoriety of their name being associated with virtual assistants. Since the release of Amazon’s voice assistant in 2014, anyone named Alexa has been subject to an uptick of joking and teasing about their name.

When The Washington Post did an analysis of data from the Social Security Administration, they found that approximately 6,000 baby girls were named Alexa in 2015, bringing the total number of American citizens with the name to about 130,000. But in the years since, the popularity of the name has plummeted.

Alexa Morales was contacted by The Washington Post about her predicament. Says Morales, “When I hear my name now, it’s not good thoughts … it’s like, tensing.” Morales eventually started going by “Lex,” as a way to distance herself from the Amazon product. “It was like, you guys have so much money and so many people working for you and not one person thought to be like, ‘Listen, Alexa is a name that people use.’”

Alexa Smith said, “I’ve heard all the jokes at this point. Somebody thought it was funny at work to just call me Siri.”

When contacted, Amazon offered the following statement:

Bullying of any kind is unacceptable, and we condemn it in the strongest possible terms. We designed our voice assistant to reflect qualities we value in people — being smart, considerate, empathetic, and inclusive. As an alternative to Alexa, we offer several other wake words customers can choose from, including Echo, Computer, Amazon and Ziggy.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Servanthood - No one wants to be called a name that's associated with subservience, but that's exactly what Jesus did by emptying himself and taking on the form of a servant. 2) Mocking – It is never acceptable to mock or put someone else down to showcase our own “humor.” We should be considerate of the feelings of others and stand with them.