ADR-0001 — Product Name: Aura
Status
Accepted (2026-05-07). Locked in plan.md §31.
Context
The product needs a short, memorable, English-renderable name suitable for a Samsung EnnovateX 2026 submission addressing Indian Gen Z and Gen Alpha. The name has to survive a multilingual judging panel, a slide deck running at projector resolution, a one-line pitch hook, a tagline (“Anticipate. Act. Stay quiet.”), and search engine indexing for a public GitHub repo at https://github.com/ShAuRyA-Noodle/Combobulating.
Constraints:
- Strict English (
plan.md §5.3). No Hinglish transliteration.
- Banned word list (
plan.md §5.3): empower, leverage, seamless, revolutionary, paradigm, etc. The name itself must not lean into hype vocabulary.
- The product is anti-anthropomorphic. It is not a chatbot, has no face, no personality, no voice. The name should not invite users to talk to it.
- The name must not collide with an existing high-profile AI assistant brand in a way that creates trademark exposure for an early-stage student project.
- The team name is
Galaxy Brain; the product name needs to feel distinct from the team name.
Forces:
- A concrete physical metaphor lets the deck use editorial typography without illustrative crutches (see
deck_spec.md §0 — display serif Fraunces).
- The name is a load-bearing piece of slide 1, slide 3, and the pitch opening line.
Decision
The product name is Aura.
The lockup pairs Aura (Fraunces 96 pt) with the tagline Anticipate. Act. Stay quiet. (Inter Tight 22 pt). The name appears in the deck, repo README, app binary identifier (ai.aura), iOS bundle (ai.aura), Android namespace (ai.aura), and every doc index. Tagline runners-up are kept only for slide-deck variant testing and not as product-line names.
Consequences
Positive:
- The name carries a soft connotation (presence, atmosphere) that pairs with “stay quiet” without anthropomorphising the system.
- Three letters, four phonemes, recognisable across South-Asian English speakers.
- Available as
ai.aura reverse-DNS for app bundle identifiers.
- Contrasts well against
Bixby, Gemini, Siri, and Pixel Assistant on the slide 5 comparison row.
Negative / costs:
- “Aura” is a common English noun; SEO will be weak in early days. Mitigated by repo and tagline pairing.
- Some existing apps and trademarks use the name in adjacent spaces (wellness apps, social-presence apps, NFT projects). Risk for a student submission is low; if the project commercialises, a trademark search and possibly a suffix (
Aura by Galaxy Brain) becomes necessary.
- Translates well in English-language markets only. International expansion would need re-evaluation. Out of scope for the EnnovateX submission.
Alternatives
- Loop — fit the closed-loop biometric wedge well, but collides directly with several developer products (Apple Loop, social-audio apps) and reads as a verb, weakening the system identity.
- Quiet — captured the Silence Budget ethos but read as a feature, not a product. Hard to use as a noun in the pitch (“Quiet says…”). Rejected.
- Stillpoint — too literary, hard to pronounce on stage, and the word reads as a meditation app rather than an intelligence layer.
- Anchor — strong noun, but used by the podcast platform Spotify owns, which creates avoidable confusion in the AI/assistant judging context.
- Lull — accurate to the silence wedge but reads as sleep-tech and lacks the agentic connotation of
Aura.
End of ADR-0001.