Here’s how we named our new AI…

Lakshmi Kumaraswami
Aug 8, 2017 · 5 min read

Naming our new baby.

This was the subject line of an email I got from Lux Narayan, TED talker, ping pong destroyer and the CEO of Unmetric Inc aka the company I’m a UX writer at. Had I missed something? Did it somehow slip my mind that my boss was an expectant father? Was he asking us to name a new pet? I opened the email.

Ah…we were finally naming our AI. Unmetric’s been relying on Artificial Intelligence to power many of our features. As a social media insights/analytics company, we’ve used AI to give brands like American Airlines, Merck, Tiffany & Co’s and Ford Promoted Post info, Reach & Impressions,and Campaign Intelligence.

Over the past 5 years, our company’s AI has been behind the scenes…till now. Now, we needed a name.

“What do you think we should call it? If there’s a story behind the name, even better. And if we do go forward with your name, besides the pleasure of naming our AI, you’ll also get US$100,” read Lux’s email.

This was going to be tricky. It was like naming a baby.

However, this baby’s name had to be pronounceable (definitely something easier to pronounce than ‘pronounceable’), it had to be popular and it had to be interesting. The name had to fit with sentences like ‘Baby’ is 99% sure that this post is promoted.

If we didn’t get this right, nobody would buy this baby (which is what we really wanted, unlike with regular babies).

I considered phoning this in and just suggesting a Game of Thrones character’s name, but then wondered how other tech companies went about naming their babies. After some googling, here’s what I found.

Siri meant beauty in one language and butt in another…

Bonus fact: Siri means ‘laugh’ in Tamil

Here’s what Adam Cheyer, cofounder of Siri had to say on Quora:

“..when coming up with Siri’s name, we wanted something that was easy to remember, short to type, comfortable to pronounce, and a not-too-common human name. And we wanted to be able to get the domain name for not too much money…

Once Siri became the leading candidate, everyone on the team had their own favorite explanation of the meaning. Dag Kittlaus, our Norwegian-American CEO, once considered using Siri as the name of his child and liked the Norse meaning “beautiful woman who leads you to victory.” For me, Siri, which means “secret” in Swahili, was a tip of the hat to our pre-named days when we began as stealth-company.com. I also liked the fact that it was the reverse of Iris, a software system I helped build as part of the CALO project which Siri spun out of. Some liked the resemblance to SRI, which was the research institute that ran the CALO project. We knew about Siri = beauty in Sinhalese, but missed that SHIRI = “butt” in Japanese (they’re not the same word, but closely pronounced…)”

Cortana started as a codename…

Cortana was named after the fictional character in Halo. Other suggestions for Microsoft’s personal assistant were Naomi and Alyx but a petition from fans of the videogame Halo helped make their decision.

An article about Cortana in The Verge reads:

“The name started from a simple suggestion from Windows Phone program manager Robert Howard in an early planning meeting. “It was just a codename, it stuck,” explains Marcus Ash, group program manager of Windows Phone. “We didn’t intend for it to be the actual product name from the beginning.””

The creators of Alexa are Trekkies

Alexa was an ode to the ancient Egyptian library of Alexandria — one of the most significant libraries in the world.

An article in Business Insider states:

“They were trying to replicate the “computer” in Star Trek, which always answered and work when any Star Trek crew simply called out the word “computer,” David Limp, the vice president in charge of Amazon Devices told attendees at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado.

The problem was choosing a word that people didn’t ordinarily use in everyday life. “Computer” wouldn’t cut it. So after testing various names, the team landed on a word Alexa, that used soft vowels and an “x.” It sounded fairly unique.”

This is how we did it…

So that’s how the most popular internet companies in the world did it, but at Unmetric, we did things a bit differently. Every employee could send multiple suggestions and then a panel of important folks would choose their favorite. The name with the most votes would win (no electoral college here).

Different names started pouring in. Alan after Alan Turing, the father of the computer. Ada after Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer. Another popular name was 42, which pop culture states is the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. One of the frontrunners was AIDA, a Marketing acronym for Attention Interest Desire and Action.

I took a more literal approach. We were naming our AI, so I googled baby names that meant ‘wisdom’ and deities of knowledge. The first site was a bit tedious, so I ditched that and focused on the deities. I picked names that were easy to say and slightly mainstream — Minerva, Athena and Sia.

I also sent in other names I liked like Zeta and Leia. And for kicks, I also threw in a Game of Thrones character (Arya).

Four days and 74 suggestions later, Lux sent a company-wide email. A decision had been made.

Say Hello to Sia, our name for our AI.

I was surprised that of all the names I’d sent in, ‘Sia’ was chosen. I thought Sia, the Egyptian goddess of wisdom would’ve been vetoed because its similarity with a certain reluctant pop star who loves swinging from chandeliers.

Lux explained that the name was the most popular for the following reasons:

  1. It was an actual human name.
  2. It was a female name. Usually it’s the voice assistants with female names and the AIs (Watson, Einstein and Albert) are usually male names. He wanted to turn that on its head.
  3. It was easy and unambiguous to pronounce.
  4. It was easy to say in a sentence: Sia is 89% sure that this post is promoted.

So that was it. Well..almost.

Sia has colic…and loves cheap thrills

Two days later, I got a call from Lux. Turns out Sia already existed. She was in a partnership with Watson and powered AI insights for another company. And let’s not forget this lovely lady. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

However, Lux had other ideas. See, he really loved the name. He loved the name so much he was close to Rick Rolling it.

He was like a mom who wanted to name her girl Ashley, but then saw too many Ashleys and renamed her Ashleigh. One cosmetic change later, he renamed Sia to….

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XIA

The X in ‘Xia’ made it more high tech and futuristic (his favorite movie is Ex-Machina). Some people were going to pronounce is Zee-yah, but that happens with any name.

So that’s how we named our AI. We love it. Now let’s see if everyone else loves it too.

‘What’s in a name?’ Shakespeare wrote. Turns out, quite a lot.

The Litmus Test

Inside with the Product Team @ Unmetric

Lakshmi Kumaraswami

Written by

Columbia J-School Graduate, Journalist, french-fry/Stephen fry enthusiast.

The Litmus Test

Inside with the Product Team @ Unmetric

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