I think the point is that Google shouldn't be in the name at all.

You are missing the point. Even a random name wouldn't work when people talk about it. Alexa is the perfect example! Google did the right thing. Google home is what people talk about and "Ok Google" is what activities the device.

That's because Google didn't give its assistant a personality. People talk about Alexa because personifying the software is powerful, otherwise they'd be talking about the Echo.

Notice how, even in your post, you say "people talk about Google Home", but the equivalent to Google Home isn't Alexa, it's the Echo Dot.

No it works perfectly well. It worked brilliantly with Siri and had done for years before. People talking about it in the same room is an inconvenience to overcome.

It's possible that Google copied Baidu, which used "Ni hao baidu" [0] is the only thing I can think of.

[0]: https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning-projects/lec... (see the video transcript)

Why, people have been asking Google a lot of questions for a long time. I can imagine the marketing department in Google not loving the idea of another name for Google.

I can see your point. They think that there is enough personality in Google as a thing. That certainly makes the most sense of what I've seen.

However I think they missed on how personal a thing it is to talk to someone. I think they should have viewed 'OK Google' as a personality that's like Google's little brother, that will ask Google for you if that's what you need or else will for example check in your diary for you.

Google doesn't need a personality. Seeing it as technology works perfectly especially when it goes wrong. It's easy to say something like, "Alexa is stupid, she can't understand a simple command", but referring to Google as tech, it is much easier to move on to reforming the command. It is also less invasive for me, personally. I'd rather refer to AI in personal terms.

"ok google" is a dealbreaker to me, but not because of google. who starts a sentence with "ok"? "hey siri" makes a bit more sense since at least you are interacting with it in a normal way. it's still weird but less robotic than 'ok google', and it's also much better than 'hey apple' for that matter

That is why I say "hey google" instead as easier to say. Our Echo gets a lot of false positives where the Google home does not. Google made the right choice in terms of usability.

What I'm responding to:

> Having to say "OK, Google" instead of just "Google" (or "Alexa") is a deal-breaker.

I don't think the argument is that it should necessarily be "Google" instead of "OK, Google." It could be anything, but whatever it is, "OK, Google" is a really clunky, robotic, and unnatural sounding phrase. Worse, it thinks it's human and conversational, but it's not, so it actually has a sort of auditory uncanny valley feeling.

It's not good.

I'm not saying they should use "Google." I don't care what they use, as long as it's better than, "OK, Google."

The Assistant now supports "Hey Google" as an option, and it's surprising how much better -feeling it is. It's less clunky, and it seems to motivate more conversational queries.

> The Assistant now supports "Hey Google" as an option

“Now” as in “since the introduction of Google Home”. (On phones prior to Google Home, it only supported “OK Google”.)