Name: Alexa. Age: Five. Appearance: The lockdown equivalent of an office affair. I don’t like where this is going. Nor should you. Lockdown has changed society in many ways. One of those is that men now fall in love with their Amazon Echos. This cannot be true. It is and it isn’t. A survey has determined that 14% of men admit to being turned on by Alexa, Amazon Echo’s proprietary voice recognition software. But … But the survey asked only 1,000 people – and it was commissioned by We-Vibe, a company that sells app-enabled sex toys, so we probably shouldn’t assume that 14% of men everywhere are getting their rocks off to Alexa. But some are. Yes. Some men have apparently been so starved of opportunities to flirt during lockdown that they are willing to attempt it with a cold, lifeless cylinder produced by a company notorious for its working conditions. I mean, she is cute. No she isn’t. She is a computer-generated voice. She isn’t even a she, for crying out loud. She is an it. That just makes her sexier. And it isn’t even private. Amazon employs staff to listen to voice recordings of you talking to Alexa, which can hear every single racy thing you tell it. That just makes her even sexier. Stop! She is a cheap, mass-produced tool designed to extend the influence of an online shop into every crevice of your home. Are you bad-mouthing my girlfriend? She isn’t your girlfriend! She is a dispossessed voice that you use mainly to listen to music and set oven timers. But I love her. No you don’t. Yes I do. If you love her, tell her that you love her. OK, I did. And what did she say? She sort of sang a doo-wop song, telling me that I was “as lovely as pie”. OK, first, that’s really weird. Second, Alexa doesn’t know what pie is. She has never tasted it and, even if by some miracle she happens to be aware of pie as an idea, she lacks the cognitive reasoning abilities to describe the sensation of eating it. So what you are saying is … She’s actually saying: “You are as lovely as the abstract concept of pie, as coded into me by an uninterested programmer thousands of miles away for the purpose of having something to rhyme with the word ‘AI’.” Phwoar. Actually, you are right. That is quite sexy. Do say: “This is just like the Spike Jonze film Her.” Don’t say: “If Her was about a man romancing a jumped-up kitchen timer.”