> We shouldn't abuse people's names by using them for products, gross generalizations, etc. It's poor taste, and it frequently hurts people unintentionally.
In the case of Alexa and Cortana, the intention is to treat the machine as a person you can talk to. It’s intentional that it has a human name.
Perhaps it's just my ignorance, but I was under the impression that Cortana was never really a name of a person, but adopted from the Halo franchise (now owned by Microsoft) as the name of the main character's AI companion, which sort of made the name up. If so, I think that makes it a little different.
I double-checked on Wikipedia for the disambiguation [1], but there doesn't seem to a subsection for a normal person-name of Cortana, as compared to the one for Alexa.
IIRC, the word 'Alexa' and the configurable alternatives 'Echo', 'Amazon', and 'Computer' are encoded into the firmware of the device itself with a wide variety of different accents accepted. Using an arbitrary word would mean everything the device hears would need to be constantly sent to Amazon so their servers could detect your custom wake word or you'd need to train the device to use your custom wake word, which would never be as accent complete as the built in wake words. That might be fine if it's just you or if everyone in your household are willing to also go through a voice recognition training session with the device.
> Using an arbitrary word would mean everything the device hears would need to be constantly sent to Amazon
Isn't it pretty well accepted that is already happening? It's why I'll never have one of these things in my house. That and I don't like talking to machines (unless I'm cursing at them).
In the case of Alexa and Cortana, the intention is to treat the machine as a person you can talk to. It’s intentional that it has a human name.