While we were exploring the most common baby names in the US last Monday, OpenAI announced its latest creation: ChatGPT-4o, an AI-powered voice assistant that makes the last generation of lackey automatons — like Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa — seem a little outdated.
That concurrence got our own data cogs whirring, so we decided to dig into a baby-naming trend that’s been brewing for a few years, and ask: where did all the Alexas go?
Some 4 decades ago, when US parents welcomed ~68K Michaels into the world, as well as ~54K baby girls named Jennifer, the name Alexa was just a small dot in the American naming psyche, ranking as the 745th most popular name for baby girls in 1983.
In the years since, though, the name’s gained traction in the States, rising to the 39th most common girl’s name in 2006, when over 6,100 Alexas were born. While the name dropped off a little after that, the steepest decline was just around the corner…
Past its Prime
When Amazon initially introduced the seminal tech in Nov. 2014, a spike in Alexas was observed in 2015, just as the voice assistant started to be heard in an increasing number of homes. However, the name’s popularity steeply declined in the years following — presumably as people increasingly grew annoyed of saying ‘Alexa’ repeatedly to their children, in addition to their beloved device.
Cut to present day: last year, only 490 babies in the US were named ‘Alexa’, and, while ‘Siri’ and ‘Google Assistant’ never really took off, we’ll have to watch this space for any little ‘GPT’s or ‘4o’s.
