My car has a feature in which I can ask it to play songs from a particular artist by voice. It works okay most of the time, though it's certainly still not as accurate as often as I'd like. Still, it's much safer for me to issue the voice command than to try to type out the artist name while driving.

The other day I tried to cue up the latest album by Chvrches (so far I'm enjoying their synth pop sound). But because they use a v where the u is, I couldn't figure out how to pronounce their name. I tried saying "churches" but that only brought up dozens of results with the word "churches" in the name.

Back when Jeff Bezos was trying to think of what to call this little online bookselling company he was going to start, he wanted a name that started with A because back then search engines alphabetized their results so having a name that began with A would put the company URL closer to the top of the page.

I suspect more and more of our interaction with computers will be using voice, and thus the next generation naming hack that means the most for maximum discoverability may be having a name that can easily be pronounced and is unambiguously unique if you hear it phonetically. Worth considering before you choose some bizarre company name just because it's the shortest URL you can find that hasn't been snapped up already.

The kicker is that Chvrches is pronounced exactly like "churches".