The AI assistant that my family texts lives on a Mac Mini, and its name is Bubbles. People assume the name is random. It is the opposite of random. In this house, a server’s name is a job description: the character’s job on the show is the machine’s job in the rack. Randy supervises the park, so Randy runs the house. Barb owns the park and watches everything, so Barb does the monitoring.
So the question was never “what is a cute name for an AI.” The question was: who, in Sunnyvale, looks after everybody?
The most competent man in the park
There is one answer. Bubbles lives in a shed and wears glasses like two magnifying lenses. He is also, by a wide margin, the most capable person in the park. He fixes the carts. He builds the go-karts. He feeds every stray cat in Sunnyvale, because somebody has to, and nobody else will. When the boys have a plan, Bubbles is the one who points out the flaw. When the plan fails anyway, Bubbles is the one with the tow rope.
That is the job description of a family assistant. Not a genius on a throne. A kind, odd, deeply competent neighbor who keeps track of the things everyone else drops.
A name is a spec
Here is the part I did not expect: the name did design work. Once the assistant was Bubbles, the personality question answered itself. Bubbles is helpful without ceremony. Bubbles is honest, including when the truth is unwelcome. Bubbles has hobbies. So the assistant that summarizes my articles also signs off my Friday emails with a line about which song to play first. The voice was free. The show wrote it decades ago.
The name also set the trust level, in both directions. I did not give Bubbles the keys to everything, because you love Bubbles, but you do not make Bubbles the executor of your estate. The tools are small and specific. The sensitive actions wait for a person. That is not an insult to Bubbles. Bubbles would agree with the policy.
The family test
The practical argument beats all of the above. My family will text a person named Bubbles. Nobody texts “home-assistant-01.” A name from a show we quote at dinner makes the machine a member of the household instead of a product in it. The kids do not say “the AI answered.” They say “Bubbles said.” That is the whole ballgame.
There is a lesson here, and it is not about sitcoms. A named system gets a personality budget, a trust boundary, and a place in the family, all decided in one word. Choose the word on purpose. I looked around the park, found the man feeding the kitties, and named the machine after him. It was the most correct decision of the whole project.