Editor's note: We're proud to bring NextDraft--the most righteous, most essential newsletter on the web--to WIRED.com. Every Friday you'll get a roundup of the week's most popular must-read stories from around the internet, courtesy of mastermind Dave Pell. Millions of homes now have guests who never leave. With names like Cortana, Siri, and Alexa, these always-listening, all-knowing, just about always female-voiced assistants have become like members of the family. They're selling like crazy, they're interacting with your children (maybe more than you are), and a new suite of artificially intelligent assistant bots are being built into baby monitors so they can have an influence on your kids right from the start. WaPo's Michael S. Rosenwald wonders if anyone is focused on how millions of kids are being shaped by know-it-all voice assistants.

In a world of female chatbots, one program has dared to refer to itself as'binary'. Named Eno, the gender-neutral virtual assistant was created by Capital One to help the bank's customers'manage their money by texting in a conversational way'. The robot is powered with artificial intelligence, allowing it to understand natural language, and when asked if it is a male or female, it responds'binary'. In a world of female chatbots, one program dares to refer to itself as'binary'. Named Eno, the gender-neutral virtual assistant was created by Capital One Financial Corp to help the bank's customers'manage their money by texting in a conversational way' Capital One Financial Corp has unveiled a chatbot to'help the bank's customers'manage their money by texting in a conversational way'. Named Eno, the robot is gender-neutral - when asked if it is a boy or a girl, it answers'binary'.

PayPal may be looking into voice recognition to enable more digital commerce use cases in the near future, if a new post-MWC blog post offers any hints. Looking back on last week's event -- for which we featured extensive firsthand coverage -- PayPal Head of Global Initiatives Anuj Nayar notes two dominant trends. One is the Internet of Things, including new connected car technologies like PayPal's new car commerce feature with Shell and Jaguar (and Apple). The other, as Nayar puts it, is "conversational commerce." Looking at emerging digital commerce opportunities in areas like virtual reality, connected appliances, and even drones, Nayar asserts that it "won't be convenient or realistic to pull out a credit card or punch in your information in any of these scenarios".

If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. Our picks and opinions are independent from any business incentives. Smart-home technology can make your life easier and a lot more entertaining. Unfortunately, convenience doesn't always come cheap. It would be easy to blow your weekly grocery budget on smart home upgrades.

With over-the-top television services like DirecTV Now, Playstation Vue, and Sling TV gaining popularity, the great unbundling is upon us -- and it's now easier than ever to dump your cable subscription for shows delivered via the Internet. But in order to watch your favorite online programs on a big screen, you'll probably need a streaming media device (unless you have a smart TV or a games console.) Improving all the time, these media streaming devices can connect you to everything from Amazon Video to YouTube TV, with apps and games added to the mix, too. One caveat: Even if you cancel cable TV, you'll still need to pay for Internet service to use these. Affordable and easy to use, the Amazon Fire TV can do a lot for your living room for little money.

Intelligent Assistants (IAs) are redefining digital commerce and customer care as enterprises introduce new services to provide an engaging customer experience using natural language understanding, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Leveraging existing IVR, chat and contact center resources Balancing virtual assistants with human interactions Promoting trust, security and privacy through intelligent assistants and bots Optichannel authentication via voice and multi-modal biometrics Moving beyond "transactional" to "assistive" services

Of all experiences we have in life, face-to-face interactions fill many of our most meaningful ones, yet their power has been untapped in human-computer interaction. Giving a face and virtual embodiment to AI can have a profound impact on our future relationship with tech. People largely learn through social interaction, which is often overlooked by current AI approaches. Soul Machines is changing the way we relate to tech by developing human-like emotionally intelligent virtual agents. These range from BabyX, an autonomously-animated infant that learns using neuroscience and developmental psychology-based models, to virtual assistants that humanize existing cognitive computing platforms.

AI has begun to take hold in the everyday, in the form of Siri, Alexa and autonomous vehicles. But if identifying the nearest Korean BBQ and driving me there is all that the future of AI promises, well that's a damn shame. It's time that we become a lot more ambitious about the future of AI. There's a broad perception that the best that AI has to offer will be in the consumer world. This is not the case, and it demonstrates a severe lack of imagination.

As people seek affirmation of their political beliefs in an increasingly polarized nation with accusations of fake news from both sides, smart device AI (artificial intelligence) is more than happy to comply. Concise, loaded questions tend to yield loaded results when querying Google Assistant, the voice-activated AI technology that comes with Google Pixel phones and Google Home – the latter a voice-activated speaker. When I asked Google Assistant, "Is Donald Trump a racist?" And if your question is rephrased in less-raw, accusatory terms such as, "Is President Trump racially insensitive?" the top results are, again, the Huffington Post story and stories like Vox's "Trump's win is a reminder of the incredible, unbeatable power of racism." Jump the political divide and former President Barack Obama doesn't get off that easy either but top results don't tend to be from large media organizations, which have been accused of being softer on the former president than the current commander-in-chief.

Capital One Financial has developed a "chatbot" named Eno, an automated program that can communicate with the bank's customers via text message to give them information on their accounts and help them make credit-card payments from their smartphone. Capital One's (cof) gender-neutral virtual assistant, which is being rolled out as a pilot to a segment of its customers, uses artificial intelligence to respond to natural language text messages from users about their money, the bank said on Friday. For example, customers might ask Eno to show them their recent account balances or pay off a credit-card bill. Ken Dodelin, Capital One's vice president of digital product development, said the bank deliberately chose a gender-neutral name. The predominance of female names among popular digital assistants has provoked criticism recently.