Searching for the perfect name, robotically

by Danny Altman

Last week I reported on my journey into the world of robotic naming, where names are untouched by human hands. They come out pure, often in staggering numbers like some species that is desperately trying to perpetuate itself.

I was looking for a name for my new business, which is an ice cream company that fights global warming. For a human, this project would be a walk in the park. For a machine, well, names that surfaced last week like TREASONGELATO and OCEANOX  suggested some loose wires.

But that’s no reason to stop trying. My next stop was netsubstance.com which offers up its own Brand Name Generator. Not much of a name, but how reasonable is it to expect self-awareness in a robot? This was the most sophisticated one I had yet encountered.

You can enter multiple keywords. You can control for length. Its secret is that it swaps out consonants for other consonants, and vowels for other vowels, so it maintains the structure of the keywords.

This one spews out tons of names, more than you can digest at one sitting. Here are a few human-edited samples of its output: CREAMAMU, ICEICE, ICEGLOBAL. They are at least on target, and exhibit a certain charm, even as they sound a little like baby ice robots crying for help. If my customers were non-humans, I might pick one of these names.

Feeling the need for some warm meat company, I headed over to WordLab, which runs a forum for people who need names but don’t have any money and people who like to name things for kicks. On September 2nd I posted a request for help and waited to see what would happen. The next day, Marcia Vital, whose own keywords are branding, naming, and Egyptian Kabalah, offered up BROKEN ICE, which is lovely but a little short on hope, which is an important part of this business idea. Although maybe if there is no hope, then people will eat more ice cream.

Later than day, someone I will only know as ree4264 unloaded this frozen cargo: SNOWCAP, FROST BITES, SNOWPAK and POLAR BEAR. Definitely in the positive territory although they still left me hungry.

But I am starting to think that sentient beings might actually have an edge over machines when it comes to naming. Next week I will put that idea to the test.

Next week: I shell out real money for one last attempt at machine naming–an unqualified disaster at Name Razor (“Create thousands of potential name ideas in minutes”), followed by checking in with the humans at Name/Express, which yielded some decent results.