SAN FRANCISCO — In the classic science fiction series that began with “Ender’s Game,” the character Jane begins by using her artificial intelligence to prepare taxes for the hero Ender, but soon takes over management of his entire financial life.

When it comes to otherworldly science fiction personalities, Jane is a rather prosaic figure, but Ethan Bloch had her in mind when he began his startup Digit.

Bloch’s company currently creates free automated savings accounts — and has helped customers put aside over $250 million — but his vision is to add capabilities until Digit becomes a full-service financial assistant like Jane.

“Everyone needs a Jane,” Bloch said.

There is now a lot of competition to create an automated financial assistant for the masses.

Credit Karma and Mint, two popular financial applications with many millions more users than Digit, are about to roll out suites of new features that will make them feel more like robotic financial advisers, tapping customers on the shoulder when they could make better financial decisions.

One feature that both Credit Karma and Mint will offer is more automated tax preparation of the sort that Jane provided for Ender (though with much less robotic charm and thoroughness).

A number of newer startups have recently begun with similar ambitions and even more advanced capabilities than existing players. The new app Albert from Albert Corp., which announced $2.5 million in seed funding last month, provides a personalized savings account as Digit does, but it can also look at existing car insurance policies and credit cards and ferret out better deals. Banks are racing to keep up with their own digital capabilities.

The startups and the banks are still far from delivering on the promise of a digital assistant that actually takes care of your financial problems for you.

Credit Karma and Mint still require you to enter many of your own details. But all the players in the field are working with machine learning and artificial intelligence that will increasingly provide proactive analysis and advice rather than forcing someone to constantly check in.

Many venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are betting that in the continuing transformation of finance by technology, the financial assistant category will be one of the most lucrative.

“There is lots of opportunity here,” said Charles Birnbaum, an investor at the venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners, who recently put money into Albert. “This is an opportunity that Mint and the banks should have done for people already — made it really easy to have a good sense for what you should be doing with your money.”

The new personal financial advisers are taking a different tack compared with big-name financial technology startups like Lending Club and Square, which provide actual financial services like arranging loans and processing payments. Credit Karma and its competitors are betting that there is more value in being the neutral intermediary that helps customers find financial services and keep track of their various accounts.

Credit Karma in particular has been demonstrating how lucrative this can be by charging lenders and credit card companies for every customer it passes along. While the company does not say how much it charges, industry insiders say that Credit Karma generally makes $100 to $700 for every customer who signs up for a credit card, a significant chunk of the revenue that the credit card company will make in the first year. Credit Karma said it pulled in around $350 million in revenue last year.

The business model creates the potential for conflicts of interest if an intermediary like Credit Karma sends customers to a credit card company or lender that pays the biggest referral fee rather than the one that offers the best deal for the customer. But the companies are all adamant that they will succeed only if they are known for doing what is best for the customer.

This week, the company is announcing its acquisition of a tax software company, OnePriceTaxes, that has been integrated into Credit Karma to allow free state and federal tax filings for every customer on the site.

Ken Lin, the founder and chief executive of the site, said that once Credit Karma had access to a customer’s tax filings it would have a much more detailed picture of that person’s finances and could turn that into new layers of financial advice — by identifying, for instance, ways to invest money with more tax efficiency.

For many, the best-known financial website is still Mint, which gained renown by allowing customers to track all their varied financial accounts in one place. It too makes money by pointing customers to outside financial products that pay Mint for each referral.

But Lin and others in the industry said that Mint, which is now owned by Intuit, struggled to maintain its early growth because it required too much work from its customers, who have to categorize their transactions and do not get much in return.

Al Ko, who became Mint’s general manager last year, acknowledges that most Americans are not willing to do the work to keep track of their finances in Mint. As a result, he has led a rebuilding of Mint so that it will do more of the work for customers, and make active recommendations rather than just serve as a place to keep track of a budget.

The banks, of course, are not happy to see companies like Mint come between them and their customers. Bank of America recently announced that it was working on its own artificial-intelligence-powered financial assistant, Erica, but it will not be out until next year.

Other new startups that offer some financial services want to expand to become the primary financial dashboard for customers. The so-called robo-advisers, like Betterment and Personal Capital, already have more details about their customers than Credit Karma or Mint, and are building out competing features. But these companies have been slow to grow at the pace of Credit Karma.