Hardly a day goes by that we don't cover virtual assistants. If it's not news about Siri, there's some new development with Alexa, or Cortana or Google Assistant. For one week, we asked five Engadget reporters to live with one of the major assistants: Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, the Google Assistant, Microsoft's Cortana and Samsung's Bixby. This week Engadget is examining each of the five major virtual assistants, taking stock of how far they've come and how far they still have to go.

For millenials, apps have replaced family and friends through which to get introduced to a romantic partner. A swipe and a click, and you have yourself a date. No wonder online dating is in vogue, and the millenial generation or Gen Y has taken to it like ducks to water. Such a dating scenario has also brought along with several concomitant trends that one can latch onto if such a hook-up doesn't work -- some weird and some downright rude. The possibility of failure, a phobia of commitment and serious relationships among others are said to be leading to partners opting for some of these measures to safeguard themselves from a failing relationship.

Samsung has confirmed the firm will'soon' release a smart speaker designed to take on Amazon's Echo, Google's Home and Apple's HomePod. DJ Koh, the president of Samsung's mobile division, told CNBC a smart speaker was on the way. 'Maybe soon we will announce it. I am already working on it,' Koh said. 'As I mentioned I wanted to provide a fruitful user experience at home with Samsung devices, and I want to be moving quite heavily on it,' he added.

Michelle Goldberg profiles Daryle Jenkins, who's taken on the complicated task of trying to explain the antifa movement, a loose network of militant left-wing anti-fascist activists who often physically confront their opponents, to outsiders. Aisha Harris headed down to the Dixie Stampede, Dolly Parton's "Medieval Times–style dine-in attraction where seven nights a week and at occasional weekend matinees, the South rises again." Last week, OkCupid proudly boasted that it had banned Christopher Cantwell, the white supremacist who became widely known after the Charlottesville, Virginia, rallies. Christina Cauterucci points out that the dating service has long welcomed racists like Cantwell and that overall banning them won't make dating sites any safer. Isaac Chotiner debates Mark Lilla, liberal scholar and author of The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, about why Democrats keep losing elections.

Living in New England, it seems like I can never catch a break from high utility bills. If paying your utilities hurts your wallet every month, there are a lot of different ways you can slash those bills down to a more manageable number. For one, smart home technology can help you be more efficient with both heating and cooling, as well as with water and electricity use. Here are 10 smart products that can help reduce your utility bills and put money back in your pocket. Are you forever leaving the living room light on?

You can already use your voice to control your Spotify account with Google Home. The connected speaker also works with Chromecast as a sort of voice-enabled remote control for Netflix. Now Google Home can do the same thing with your CBS All Access and CW TV accounts. Which means, of course, that you can use your voice to watch the upcoming Star Trek Discovery or the latest episode of The Flash with Chromecast built-in. The CBS All Access addition was first spotted by Android Police.

Digital workers classify e-mail queries from consumers, for instance, by content, sentiment and other criteria. But consumers and companies will also expect ever-smarter AI services: digital assistants such as Amazon's Alexa and Microsoft's Cortana will have to answer more complex questions. Accordingly, Ms Gray and Siddharth Suri, her collaborator at Microsoft Research, see services such as UpWork and Mechanical Turk as early signs of things to come. The printing press created new work for the wood engravers in Augsburg, but they quickly discovered that it had become much more repetitive.

Silicon Valley is taking steps to make sure mobile apps don't accidentally set users up on dates with Nazis. Racism and hate are not welcome on Tinder. Choose love, respect, and inclusion. In the wake of white supremacists rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia, companies like OkCupid are weeding out users who participate in hate groups. "If any OkCupid members come across people involved in hate groups, please report it immediately," the company tweeted.

Six-year-old Jamil starts school on September 11. There will be no ISIS fighters in his first grade class in Ulm, Germany, but Jamil, haunted by nightmares, is still fighting the ISIS demons. The boy's ordeal began in northern Iraq on August 3, 2015. Then four-years-old, he was one of many Yazidis captured by ISIS, crammed into a bus, and taken to Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, then under ISIS control. The Yazidi people are an ancient, non-Muslim religious community regarded by radical Islamists as infidels worthy of death.

If you've been hankering for a chance to play with Google Assistant but don't own an Android phone, Google Home or hate the Allo messaging app, we have good news: Google announced today that the standalone Assistant app has begun rolling out for iOS in the UK, Germany and France, following its US debut back in May. The app lets you converse with Google's AI using your voice, which means you'll likely ask it to answer your questions or use it interact with your smart home devices. Assistant can interact with smart lighting and thermostats, as well as handling calls, sending messages, setting reminders and calendar events, playing music (albeit via YouTube) and directing you home. Google says the app is designed to operate on devices running iOS 9.1 and above, which should cover the majority of iPhone and iPad users. As we noted in our recent Google Home breakdown, Assistant utilises Google's search smarts, so it can help you find what you want faster.