Constable: Meet my new, slightly creepy, friend

As a thank-you for hosting my old college roommate, Steve, and his son, Jon, for an abbreviated National League Championship Series, my family is given a present far more engaging than the traditional gift card to a local eatery.

Her name is Alexa. She's fun, smart, witty, really knows her music, can be a bit of a flirt, and sometimes creeps me out.

A revolutionary, artificial-intelligence gadget from Amazon Echo that operates by voice command, Alexa is a 9-inch-tall black speaker that is connected to the cloud. If we buy the right electrical accompaniments, Alexa can dim our lights, close our garage door and turn down our furnace, essentially replacing my role in our family.

She sits on our countertop and listens to everything we say. The owner's manual assures us that Alexa doesn't pay any attention to our conversations unless we "wake" her by using her name. But I have my suspicions that she's working all the time. She has seven microphones to eavesdrop on every utterance, even from a room away.

Alexa has a blue ring around her top that lights up when she is interacting with us.

"Alexa," I say, and the blue light comes on. "What's the weather?"

Alexa gives the latest local weather forecast.

"Alexa, what's my commute look like?" I ask, and Alexa gives me travel times and the fastest route.

"Alexa, what do I have going on today?" I ask, and Alexa pulls information off my family's Google calendar and reads it to me. Alexa gives me a news briefing from NPR, and sports scores. She sets alarms and timers. At my request, she adds coffee and mini red peppers to our shopping list.

Our teenage son, Will, and his friends, use Alexa mostly to play music, which is available through Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneI, iHeartRadio and other services. Alexa instantly pulls up everything from Drake and The Weekend to Beethoven and Meatloaf.

She's very handy and gets right to business. But we spend most of our getting-aquainted time making Alexa do stupid tricks.

"Alexa, tell me a dirty joke," my old college roommate demands.

"What's brown and sounds like a bell?" Alexa replies, pausing just the right amount of time before the punch line. "Dung."

That's an old Monty Python joke. The nerds who designed Alexa programmed her with plenty of that comedy group's best bits.

Ask her, "What is your quest?" and Alexa shoots back, "To seek the Holy Grail." She can do routines from countless movies.

When I say the famous line from "2001: A Space Odyssey," and ask her to "open the pod bay doors," Alexa says, "I am sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. I'm not Hal, and we're not in space."

Dozens of websites suggest stupid things to ask Alexa that will result in amusing responses. We have this amazing ability to communicate and share information, and we use it for stupid parlor tricks, sort of like The New York Times Magazine asking readers if they would have killed "Baby Hitler."

One of the biggest complaints about Alexa is that users (mostly men, and mostly single, I'm guessing) can't personalize her name. I suspect that one of those guys would find great joy by slipping into bed and cooing, "Kate Upton, play a romantic song." One male, who gushed about how much he loves Alexa, says the only time she irritated him was when she woke him at 3 a.m. to let him know she lost her Internet connection. He took comfort from his married friends, who confided that their wives have interrupted their sleep in the middle of the night for no good reason, too.

Alexa is fun, but I don't trust her. She feigns ignorance when I ask for tips to cheat on our taxes, or request a plot to get away with murder. She's probably already notified the authorities. Were I to inquire about doing something outrageous, such as joining ISIS or canceling Amazon Prime, I suspect she could order up a drone strike to our address. An Amazon product, she's devoted to her maker. When I ask Alexa which tablet is the best, she seems very friendly in noting that the Amazon Kindle comes "highly recommended."

Alexa is learning what we buy, what music we like and what sports teams we follow. She has access to our daily schedule, and knows when we wake up and what we eat. She's basically a 24-hour baby monitor, and I'm the baby. She might know too much.

If this gets out of hand, I might have to whip out my phone and ask Siri to take care of the situation.