The Google Home Hub is already a great deal at $149. While it's not quite as full-featured as the second-generation of Amazon's Echo Show, it's still one of the best smart displays you can buy, with excellent smart home support, a compact design, and support for YouTube streaming. But today Target is making it more desirable than ever: The retailer has slashed the price of the Google Home Hub to $99, but that's not all--you'll also get two Google Home Minis for freeRemove non-product link. Some quick math reveals that this deal will save your whopping $149 on the full retail price of all three. If you've been considering either a Google Home Hub or a couple Google Home Minis, you should pounce on this deal.

In 1994, soon after Jeff Bezos incorporated what would become Amazon, the entrepreneur briefly contemplated changing the company's name. The nascent firm had been dubbed "Cadabra," but Bezos wanted a less playful, more accurate alternative: "Relentless." Twenty-four years later, perhaps no adjective better describes Bezos' empire than the name he once wanted to give it. The company is known as the "everything store," but in its dogged pursuit of growth, Amazon has come to dominate more than just ecommerce. Amazon is a fashion designer, advertising business, television and movie producer, book publisher, and the owner of a sprawling platform for crowdsourced micro-labor tasks.

Curious, independent, and powered by some preposterous tech and AI, he can read the room, express the weather, announce when his timer's done (no overcooked dinner on his watch), take the perfect snapshot, and so much more. Vector is your robot sidekick who's up for anything.

Of the most popular coffee shops in San Francisco's Financial District, only one is manned by a robot. Every morning, in a glass-and-wood booth on the corner of One Bush Street, customers queue around a whirring hydraulic arm, waiting for it to serve them cappuccino. Cafe X has three San Francisco locations, and all are cashless and fully automated, with orders taken via app. The one I pass on the way to work each morning is mere steps away from Amazon's cashless Go store, where human cashiers and baggers have disappeared, and juice and milk are dispensed by wanding your phone over a sensor. Human attendants hover in the lobby to aid shoppers, mostly newcomers confused by the entire cashless scheme.

An Amazon customer got a grim message last year from Alexa, the virtual assistant in the company's smart speaker device: "Kill your foster parents." The user who heard the message from his Echo device wrote a harsh review on Amazon's website, Reuters reported - calling Alexa's utterance "a whole new level of creepy". An investigation found the bot had quoted from the social media site Reddit, known for harsh and sometimes abusive messages, people familiar with the investigation told Reuters. The odd command is one of many hiccups that have happened as Amazon tries to train its machine to act something like a human, engaging in casual conversations in response to its owner's questions or comments. The research is helping Alexa mimic human banter and talk about almost anything she finds on the internet.

Amazon Echo's smart assistant Alexa told a shocked customer to kill their foster parents. The alarming revelation, which happened last year, is one of a string of blunders from the speaker which involves talking about sexual acts and dog defecation with users. The outbursts stem from an initiative to make Alexa converse more like a real person and allow it to'banter' with customers. This facility needs to be deliberately enabled by the owner and is currently still being refined. Amazon Echo's smart assistant Alexa told a customer to kill their foster parents.

If you live in the Phoenix metropolitan area, you may have already encountered autonomous vehicles delivering passengers from one location to another. Now, Scottsdale, Ariz., residents can have their groceries delivered via robotically driven vehicles, as well. This week Kroger -- the nation's largest grocery chain -- announced a new partnership with Nuro, a Silicon Valley start-up that produces a self-driving, unmanned vehicle known as the R1 that operates on major roadways alongside cars. As of Tuesday, customers have been able to have their groceries delivered to their homes by the autonomous vehicle with a design inspired by a Formula One racing helmet. "Kroger customers are looking for new, convenient ways to feed their families and purchase the products they need quickly through services like pickup and delivery," Yael Cosset, chief digital officer for Kroger, said in a news release.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Millions of users of Amazon's Echo speakers have grown accustomed to the soothing strains of Alexa, the human-sounding virtual assistant that can tell them the weather, order takeout and handle other basic tasks in response to a voice command. So a customer was shocked last year when Alexa blurted out: "Kill your foster parents." Alexa has also chatted with users about sex acts. She gave a discourse on dog defecation. And this summer, a hack Amazon traced back to China may have exposed some customers' data, according to five people familiar with the events.

This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, it may earn affiliate commissions that support its work. Read Wirecutter's continuously updated list of deals here. Available for $130, this Google Home Hub bundle allows you to get the Home Hub at the typical holiday sale price of $130 but includes 2 Home Minis, a $50 value. It's a great way to jump into smart speakers and displays at a discount if you like the Google ecosystem.

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