What exactly do I get with a Flash report?

You receive a PDF report containing 300 candidates scored across 14 psychoacoustic dimensions, a ranked top-20 shortlist with composite scores, a basic cross-language compatibility check, and full phoneme-level analysis for your brief. Everything is grounded in academic linguistics research, not opinion.

Voxa -- Computational Naming Engine

The method

Three adversarial teams.
300 to 1,500+ candidates. One winner.

Based on the Placek strategic framework from Lexicon Branding — the agency behind Pentium, Febreze, and PowerBook. Quantity leads to quality. Tension beats consensus.

Step 01 -- Brief

Your project brief

Describe your product, target audience, and brand personality. Studio tier adds the Placek strategic framework to surface the ultimate benefit no competitor can claim.

Product description and audience
Brand personality traits
Competitive landscape
Target market languages

Step 02 -- Generate

Adversarial generation

Three independent teams work the brief from different angles. Team 1 gets the real brief. Team 2 gets a modified constraint. Team 3 starts in a completely unrelated category.

Three independent AI generation teams
300 (Flash) to 1,500+ (Studio) candidates
Category-breaking exploration
Approximate thinking, not safe thinking

Step 03 -- Score + select

Computational filtering

Every name is scored across sound symbolism, structural quality, and semantic fit. The engine finds names in the tension zone: polarizing enough to have energy, familiar enough to process instantly.

14-dimension phoneme profiling
Surprisingly Familiar metric
Tension Zone positioning
Cross-language safety screening

Step 04 -- Deliver

Proposal to your inbox

A ranked PDF proposal lands in your inbox. Flash in 30 minutes. Studio in 2 hours. Top 20 shortlist with full scoring rationale, typographic context tests, and IP due diligence guidance per candidate.

Top 20 shortlist: Brand Archetype + phonetic score per finalist
8 deep-dives: name construction, archetype rationale, context test
Name in Context: WSJ headline, TechCrunch launch, dotcom formats
IP first steps: domains + USPTO trademark classes per candidate

The engine

Four-factor composite scoring

Every candidate is evaluated across four independent factor groups. Each factor breaks into sub-scores measured on 0-1 scales, combined into a single composite that ranks names against your brief.

Grounded in academic research: Sapir sound symbolism (1929) — Klink phonesthetic analysis (2000) — Kohler bouba/kiki effect (1929) — Placek strategic framework, Lexicon Branding

0.74

Composite

Sound

0.76

Structure

0.92

Semantics

0.55

Tension

0.77

Example: "Voxa" composite breakdown

Sound Symbolism

How the name sounds against the brand's target personality. Each phoneme maps to 14 psychoacoustic dimensions. Plosives (B, K, P) signal power and reliability. Fricatives (V, Z) carry speed and innovation. CVCV patterns maximize processing fluency.

Target alignment Processing fluency Cross-language safety Phonetic energy

Structural Quality

The visual and cognitive architecture of the name. Short syllable counts, balanced letter ratios, visual distinctiveness in a headline, ease of spelling and recall. A name that fails structure fails in practice.

Syllable score Letter balance Visual distinction Memorability Spellability

Semantic Fit

Does the name carry the right meaning, or better, the right absence of wrong meaning? We measure clarity, category fit, emotional resonance, surprise factor, and the Surprisingly Familiar metric: a geometric mean of how learnable and how unexpected a name is.

Meaning clarity Category fit Emotional resonance Surprise factor Surprisingly Familiar

Placek Tension (15%)

The tension zone metric. Developed by David Placek of Lexicon Branding (Pentium, Febreze, PowerBook). Measures how surprisingly familiar a name feels: unexpected enough to command attention, familiar enough to feel inevitable. 0.0 = invisible, 0.75+ = optimal zone.

Familiar morpheme density Pattern surprise score Tension composite

Proof of concept

Never evaluate a name
on a spreadsheet.

Names only mean something in context. Every finalist in your proposal is tested in typographic context, placed against your competitors, evaluated for semantic believability, and screened across target market languages.

Headline test

See the name in a WSJ headline, a TechCrunch announcement, a Product Hunt launch. Does it read like a company or a typo?

Semantic believability

Category fit and meaning clarity are scored independently. Does the name feel like it belongs to this industry? Does it suggest purpose without spelling it out? The one-second believability test, scored.

Competitor shelf

Placed alongside real competitors. Does the name stand out or blend in? The shelf test reveals whether a name has enough structural differentiation to survive in context.

Language audit

Cross-checked against major languages for unintended meanings, negative associations, and pronunciation difficulty. A great English name that means something unfortunate in Mandarin is not a great name.

How We Compare

Three ways to name a company.
One is worth your time.

Free tools generate suggestions. Agencies run workshops. Voxa applies the same phonetic methodology as top branding firms -- computationally, in 30 minutes, for a fraction of the price.

Free AI tools

Namelix, Brandmark

Free

No phonetic scoring — names selected by popularity pattern, not linguistic rigor

No brief — same engine runs for every category and client

No cross-language check — unintended meanings go undetected

No IP guidance — domain and trademark research left to you

No deliverable — a list with no archetype mapping, no construction analysis, no rationale you can share with your team

Instant — but you will spend hours sorting through low-signal output

Recommended

Voxa

Computational naming

$499 — $4,999

✓

300+ candidates scored across 14 psychoacoustic dimensions per engagement

✓

Brief-driven generation — three adversarial teams calibrated to your category and audience

✓

Cross-language safety — screened across major markets before delivery

✓

IP due diligence — domain variants and USPTO trademark classes identified

✓

Ranked PDF proposal — Brand Archetype, Name Construction analysis, Name in Context, and full phonetic scoring per finalist

✓

30-minute delivery — proposal in your inbox before your next meeting

Naming agencies

Lexicon, Catchword, Igor

$50,000 — $200,000+

✓

Deep linguistic research — the methodology Voxa applies computationally

✓

Strategic brief workshops — multiple sessions with senior strategists

✓

Full trademark clearance — legal search included in engagement fee

Not fast — typical engagement runs 4 to 8 weeks from kickoff to delivery

Not accessible — minimum engagement budgets exclude most startups and SMBs

Not transparent — proprietary scoring with no data behind the recommendation

30-day money-back guarantee — delivered in approximately 30 minutes

Who uses Voxa

Three situations.
One decision to make.

Naming projects fail the same way every time: too many options, no data, no deliverable. Voxa is built for the moment when gut feel stops being enough.

Flash — $499

Your launch window is six weeks. The name isn't settled.

You need validated options before the funding announcement, the product launch, or the next board meeting. Not a list of 20 names that all feel the same — a ranked shortlist with the reasoning behind each one.

300 candidates evaluated against your brief — attributes, competitors, audience.
Proposal in your inbox in approximately 30 minutes.

Studio — $4,999

The name will carry real marketing spend. It has to be right.

You are launching a funded consumer brand, entering a competitive market, or naming something that will appear in a Super Bowl spot in two years. The name is a business decision, not a creative exercise. It needs to be defensible.

1,500+ candidates — 5x the pool — guided by the Placek strategic framework.
Scoring calibrated to your ultimate benefit and competitive gap.

Flash or Studio

The current name is holding you back. You know it. Everyone knows it.

Rebrands fail when they replace one mediocre name with another. The brief form lets you describe what the current name gets wrong and where you need to go. The engine generates and scores against those parameters specifically — not category defaults.

Cross-language safety checked before delivery.
IP guidance per candidate — domain variants and USPTO trademark classes.

Live output

300 candidates.
Real brief. Real scores.

An AI infrastructure company needed to stand apart from generic cloud and AI naming conventions. Here is what the engine returned. Every row is a real candidate, scored in full.

Brief

Developer platform for deploying and orchestrating AI agents at scale. Targeting ML engineers and platform teams at Series A+ startups. Differentiating from cloud-generic and data-warehouse naming conventions. Competitors: Modal, Replicate, RunPod.

Run stats

300 candidates generated
3 adversarial teams
~22 minutes from brief to proposal

Name	Composite	Sound	Structure	Semantics	Tension
Terio #1 — shortlisted	0.753	0.762	0.933	0.548	0.75
Valer #2 — shortlisted	0.749	0.711	0.905	0.517	0.83
Rexia #3 — shortlisted	0.745	0.744	0.913	0.556	0.75
Valai #4 — shortlisted	0.743	0.737	0.925	0.547	0.75
Rexai #5 — shortlisted	0.737	0.738	0.913	0.537	0.75
Dutal #6	0.737	0.737	0.905	0.546	0.75
Zenium #7	0.734	0.683	0.895	0.562	0.83
Bezer #8	0.730	0.723	0.881	0.502	0.75

295 additional candidates evaluated and ranked. Full top-20 shortlist + detailed breakdowns in the delivered PDF. View a complete sample proposal

Included in every proposal

Name in Context

Every finalist is rendered in three real editorial formats so you can hear how it sounds before you commit.

Press headline

Terio Raises $40M Series B to Unify AI Infrastructure for Production Engineering Teams

WSJ / TechCrunch headline format

Product launch

Terio — Unified ops infrastructure for ML engineers shipping production AI at scale. Now generally available.

Product Hunt / launch copy format

Domain / brand

terio.ai

Terio

Dotcom / brand mark format

Context rendering for all 20 finalists is included in every Flash and Studio proposal.

Studio exclusive

The Placek Strategic Framework

David Placek developed this methodology at Lexicon Branding — the agency behind Pentium, Febreze, and PowerBook. Four questions that surface the one benefit no competitor can claim. Your answers become the primary filter for all 1,500+ candidates.

01 — Define winning

How do you define winning?

Describe the exact reaction a first-time buyer or a journalist should have. Not a feature list — a perception. This defines the success criteria the name must ultimately achieve.

Shapes the tension zone target — names are filtered for whether they land the right first impression.

02 — What you have

What do you have to win?

Name the advantages that are genuinely yours right now: technology, team, IP, data, customer access. The name should hint at these strengths, not hide them.

Guides generation Team 2 to produce names that encode your competitive edge rather than category defaults.

03 — What you need

What do you need to win?

Be honest about the gaps between where you are and where you need to be: market awareness, trust, differentiation, or enterprise permission. The name helps close these gaps.

Calibrates the surprise-familiarity balance — higher tension when trust is needed, higher energy when differentiation is the gap.

04 — What you say

What do you need to say?

The single idea the name must encode without explanation. One sentence a listener should feel before they know what the company does. This becomes the primary filter for the top of the shortlist.

Becomes the semantic scoring anchor — every finalist is evaluated against whether it encodes this message phonetically.

Generation

All three adversarial teams receive your Placek brief as explicit strategic context. Names are generated to encode your ultimate benefit — not just category conventions.

Scoring

The semantic scoring layer is calibrated to your four answers. A name that encodes your "need to say" is weighted up. Generic category-fit is weighted down.

Deliverable

Studio proposals include a dedicated strategy page showing exactly how your brief shaped the shortlist — a document you can share with a board or investor to explain the methodology.

1,500+ candidates · ~2 hour delivery · 30-day guarantee

Pricing

Agency-grade naming.
Not agency prices.

Lexicon Branding charges $75,000 to $200,000 per engagement. Voxa applies the same phonetic methodology computationally — with a ranked proposal delivered to your inbox.

View Flash sample report (PDF) View Studio sample report (PDF)

Most Popular

Flash

$499

Delivered in ~30 minutes

300 candidates scored, ranked, and delivered to your inbox before your next meeting.

✓300 candidates evaluated across 3 adversarial generation teams
✓Full 14-dimension phoneme analysis + four-factor composite score
✓Top 20 shortlist: Brand Archetype + phonetic breakdown per finalist
✓Name Construction analysis: etymology strategy, morpheme type, consonant character
✓Name in Context: each finalist in WSJ headline, TechCrunch launch, and dotcom formats
✓Cross-language compatibility + IP due diligence guidance per candidate

30-day money-back guarantee

See what a Flash report looks like

For funded brands

Studio

$4,999

Delivered in ~2 hours

For funded startups and consumer brands where the name carries real marketing spend. Scoring calibrated to your competitive positioning — not just category conventions — using the Placek framework from Lexicon Branding (Pentium, Febreze, PowerBook) across 1,500+ candidates.

✓Everything in Flash
✓1,500+ candidates evaluated — 5x the coverage
✓Placek strategic brief: define your ultimate benefit, competitive advantage, and market gap
✓Generation explicitly guided by your competitive positioning
✓Dedicated strategy page in PDF — naming criteria derived from your Placek brief
✓Scoring calibrated to your ultimate benefit — not just category conventions

30-day money-back guarantee — no questions asked

See what a Studio report looks like

Enterprise

$25K+

Timeline scoped on intake

White-glove engagement. Dedicated naming strategist, trademark pre-screening, board-ready presentation.

✓Everything in Studio
✓Dedicated naming strategist
✓Trademark pre-screening
✓Board presentation deck
✓Domain acquisition support
✓Brand voice guidelines
✓90-day post-launch support

Results

What the engine produces.

Flash — AI SaaS naming

A 300-candidate Flash run against an AI analytics platform brief returned 58 names clearing the 0.70 composite quality bar. The top-ranked candidate scored 0.753 across 14 dimensions. Each finalist received a Brand Archetype classification, Name Construction analysis, and Name in Context rendering in WSJ headline, TechCrunch launch, and dotcom formats alongside IPA transcription, domain variants, and trademark search pointers.

0.753top composite score

58names above 0.70 bar

22 mindelivery time

Flash — B2B platform naming

A platform brief for a B2B data product generated a shortlist where the top name combined high Energy and Authority with low Warmth — classified as Precise Minimalist archetype, matching the brief’s precision-first positioning. Each finalist included a Name Construction analysis explaining the morpheme strategy and consonant profile, social handle checks (X, LinkedIn), and domain and USPTO trademark guidance.

14phoneme dimensions scored

20names in ranked shortlist

8deep-dive breakdowns

Your result

Run the free demo above to see your name scored across all 14 dimensions — Energy, Authority, Innovation, Warmth, Precision, and 9 more. No account required.

FAQ

Common questions

Flash reports are typically delivered to your inbox within 30 minutes of payment. Studio engagements are also fully automated -- you complete the Placek strategic framework at checkout and typically receive your 1,500-candidate proposal within 2 hours. Enterprise timelines are scoped during onboarding.

You receive a multi-page PDF proposal containing: 300 candidates scored across 14 psychoacoustic and semantic dimensions; a ranked top-20 shortlist with composite scores and Brand Archetype classification (Assertive Leader, Dynamic Connector, Trusted Companion, or Precise Minimalist) per finalist; a Name Construction analysis for each shortlisted name covering etymology strategy, morpheme type, and consonant character; Name in Context rendering — every finalist placed in a WSJ headline, a TechCrunch launch post, and a dotcom format so you can hear it in context before committing; cross-language compatibility checks; and IP due diligence guidance with domain variants and USPTO trademark classes. All scoring is grounded in academic linguistics research, not opinion. If you submit competitor names, every finalist also receives a Competitor Proximity Alert flagging any phonetic overlap above the similarity threshold.

Flash and Studio reports include linguistic analysis, cross-language suitability checks, and IP due diligence guidance -- domain variants to check and the USPTO trademark classes most relevant to your category. We do not perform automated conflict screening. Engage a trademark attorney before committing to any name. Enterprise engagements include trademark pre-screening as a dedicated deliverable.

ChatGPT will give you names. The problem is you have no idea which ones are good. There is no phoneme analysis, no brief-calibrated scoring against your specific audience and competitors, no cross-language safety check, no tension-zone evaluation, and no structured deliverable you can share with a board or investor. You will generate 20 names, look at them on a list, and choose based on gut feel. That is brainstorming, not naming. Voxa applies the same analytical framework top agencies charge $75,000+ to run — and delivers a ranked PDF with the data behind every finalist. The generation engine uses AI. The scoring engine is what you are paying for.

Free tools generate names at random and surface the ones that look good on a logo. They have no model of what a name means phonetically, no brief-calibrated scoring, and no way to tell you whether a name will be perceived as authoritative in German, whether it clusters phonetically with your competitors, or whether it sits in the tension zone between familiar and surprising. Voxa evaluates every candidate across 14 psychoacoustic and semantic dimensions against your specific brief, surfaces the performers, and delivers a ranked PDF report with IP guidance you can hand to a trademark attorney. You are not paying for name generation — you are paying for the analysis that tells you which names will actually work.

Traditional naming agencies like Lexicon or Igor charge $75,000 to $200,000 per engagement and take 6 to 12 weeks. Their methodology is largely the same psychoacoustic and semantic analysis we run computationally. Voxa applies that same framework at speed and a fraction of the cost. You get the rigor without the retainer.

If you are not satisfied with your report for any reason, email us within 30 days of purchase and we will issue a full refund. No forms, no interrogation. We stand behind the quality of every report we generate.

Yes. Your brief is used solely to calibrate name generation and scoring for your project. We do not share, publish, or sell client briefs. Your project details are not used to train models or improve outputs for other clients. If you are naming a pre-launch product, your submission is handled with the same confidentiality as any professional agency engagement.

You do. All candidate names in your proposal belong exclusively to you. Voxa makes no claim on any name in your report. Names are generated to your brief and scored for your specific use case — we have no interest in or right to use them. You are free to adopt, trademark, or register any name from your report without restriction from us.

Yes. Rebrands are one of the most common use cases. The brief form lets you describe your current positioning, what is not working, and where you want to go. The engine will generate and score candidates against those strategic parameters specifically.

Choose Flash if you need a strong shortlist fast — early-stage startup naming, product launches, or any project where you need validated options before your next meeting. Flash delivers 300 candidates scored against your brief in about 30 minutes for $499. Choose Studio if the name will carry significant marketing spend, if you are launching a funded consumer brand or entering a competitive market where phonetic differentiation matters, or if you want naming criteria derived from a strategic framework rather than category defaults. Studio runs the Placek methodology — four questions that map your competitive positioning — against 1,500+ candidates and delivers in about 2 hours for $4,999. If you are unsure, Flash is a low-risk starting point. Many clients use Flash to validate the direction, then upgrade to Studio for their final shortlist.

About

Voxa was built to apply the same phoneme analysis framework that top naming consultancies use for $50,000+ engagements — and make it accessible for founders who need a name that works, not just a list of options.

The scoring engine runs every candidate through 14 psychoacoustic dimensions derived from decades of linguistics research: Sapir sound symbolism, Klink phonesthetic analysis, the Kohler bouba/kiki effect, and the Placek strategic framework used by Lexicon Branding — the agency behind Pentium, Febreze, and PowerBook — for over three decades. The generation engine uses AI. The analysis is what you pay for.

Every brief runs through three adversarial teams generating independently. Every candidate is ranked on a single composite score derived from those 14 dimensions, calibrated to your audience, competitors, and brand personality. The output is a structured PDF you can share with co-founders, a board, or a trademark attorney without explanation.

Flash delivers in approximately 30 minutes. Studio, with the full Placek strategic framework and 1,500+ candidates, in approximately 2 hours. Both come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Questions before you order: [email protected]

The name that works
before you say a word

Your project brief

Adversarial generation

Computational filtering

Proposal to your inbox

Headline test

Semantic believability

Competitor shelf

Language audit

Your launch window is six weeks. The name isn't settled.

The name will carry real marketing spend. It has to be right.

The current name is holding you back. You know it. Everyone knows it.

Your name is the first
thing people feel

The name that worksbefore you say a word

Your project brief

Adversarial generation

Computational filtering

Proposal to your inbox

Headline test

Semantic believability

Competitor shelf

Language audit

Your launch window is six weeks. The name isn't settled.

The name will carry real marketing spend. It has to be right.

The current name is holding you back. You know it. Everyone knows it.

Your name is the firstthing people feel

The name that works
before you say a word

Your name is the first
thing people feel