Amazon.com Inc. plans to bring ChatGPT-style product search to its web store, rivaling efforts by Microsoft Corp. and Google to weave generative artificial intelligence into their search engines. The e-commerce giant's ambitions appear in recent job postings reviewed by Bloomberg News. One listing seeking a senior software development engineer says the company is "reimagining Amazon Search with an interactive conversational experience" designed to help users find answers to questions, compare products and receive personalized suggestions. "We're looking for the best and brightest across Amazon to help us realize and deliver this vision to our customers right away," the company said in the listing, which was posted on its jobs board last month. "This will be a once in a generation transformation for Search."

The biggest news in tech this week came from Google's annual developer conference on Wednesday. They announced three new devices: The Pixel 7a smartphone, the Pixel Tablet and the Pixel Fold. Discounts on brand new products don't happen often, but both Amazon and Google were quick to bundle Pixel 7a orders with a $50 Amazon gift card, or a free pair of Pixel Buds, respectively -- not sales per se, but free stuff is still compelling for anyone already planning on getting a new phone. Of course, there were deals unrelated to Google too, like savings on Amazon devices including the Fire TV Stick 4K Max, Echo speakers, and nearly all Kindle models. Here are the best tech deals from this week that you can still get today.

Purchases you make through the links below may earn us and our publishing partners a commission. "Breath of the Wild" fans, rejoice: The Blood Moon rises once again. The next game in Nintendo's "The Legend of Zelda" franchise, "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom" arrives tomorrow. Make smart choices without hours of googling. In "Tears of the Kingdom," players will return to Hyrule and follow up on Link's story in the wake of "Breath of the Wild."

Modern language models can generate high-quality short texts. However, they often meander or are incoherent when generating longer texts. These issues arise from the next-token-only language modeling objective. Recent work in self-supervised learning suggests that models can learn good latent representations via contrastive learning, which can be effective for discriminative tasks. Our work analyzes the application of contrastive representations for generative tasks, like long text generation. We propose one approach for leveraging constrastive representations, which we call Time Control (TC). TC first learns a contrastive representation of the target text domain, then generates text by decoding from these representations. Compared to domain-specific methods and fine-tuning GPT2 across a variety of text domains, TC performs competitively to methods specific for learning sentence representations on discourse coherence. On long text generation settings, TC preserves the text structure both in terms of ordering (up to $+15\%$ better) and text length consistency (up to $+90\%$ better).

Vacuuming is one of those daily tasks that never really goes away. But as technology has advanced, new vacuums can handle cleaning your floors for you -- and with so many robot vacuum deals out there, you don't have to spend an arm and a leg to cross vacuuming off your to-do list. Right now at eBay, you can take an extra 20% off (up to $100) new and refurbished iRobot devices and accessories when you use promo code IROBOT20 at checkout. There's no minimum order requirements and you can use the promo code up to two times now through May 14. There are a ton of options available that can save you a little time and effort when tidying up, including the Roomba S9 Plus robot vacuum with a self-emptying base, which earned a spot on our list of the best robot vacuums for 2023.

Understanding the customers' high level shopping intent, such as their desire to go camping or hold a birthday party, is critically important for an E-commerce platform; it can help boost the quality of shopping experience by enabling provision of more relevant, explainable, and diversified recommendations. However, such high level shopping intent has been overlooked in the industry due to practical challenges. In this work, we introduce Amazon's new system that explicitly identifies and utilizes each customer's high level shopping intents for personalizing recommendations. We develop a novel technique that automatically identifies various high level goals being pursued by the Amazon customers, such as "go camping", and "preparing for a beach party". Our solution is in a scalable fashion (in 14 languages across 21 countries). Then a deep learning model maps each customer's online behavior, e.g. product search and individual item engagements, into a subset of high level shopping intents. Finally, a realtime ranker considers both the identified intents as well as the granular engagements to present personalized intent-aware recommendations. Extensive offline analysis ensures accuracy and relevance of the new recommendations and we further observe an 10% improvement in the business metrics. This system is currently serving online traffic at amazon.com, powering several production features, driving significant business impacts

And if you happen to be upgrading your PC in anticipation of Activision-Blizzard's next great dungeon crawler, Nvidia has a deal for you. If you buy a GeForce RTX 4070, 4070 Ti, 4080, or 4090, you'll get a digital code for Diablo IV for free, along with some in-game goodies for the game and other Blizzard titles. The offer is good from now until June 13th, and though the Rise Against Evil bundle is limited to "select retailers," it shouldn't be too hard to find -- these code bundles generally show up at all the major retailers. In addition to the $70 game (ouch), the code includes the Light-Bearer Mount and Caparison of Faith Armor for Diablo IV, Inarius Wings and Inarius Murloc pet for Diablo III, an Amalgam Rage Mount for World of Warcraft, and the Umber Winged Darkness Cosmetics set for the Diablo Immortal game for PCs and mobile devices. If that's not enough, the latest version of Diablo IV supports Nvidia's impressive DLSS 3 technology, which you can try out in the Server Slam Beta taking place between May 12th and 14th.

There is evidence that address matching plays a crucial role in many areas such as express delivery, online shopping and so on. Address has a hierarchical structure, in contrast to unstructured texts, which can contribute valuable information for address matching. Based on this idea, this paper proposes a novel method to leverage the hierarchical information in deep learning method that not only improves the ability of existing methods to handle irregular address, but also can pay closer attention to the special part of address. Experimental findings demonstrate that the proposed method improves the current approach by 3.2% points.

If you missed the chance to buy the Echo Show 8 when it was discounted to $75 at the start of April, Amazon has once again reduced the smart display to that price. The $55 cut means the Echo Show 8 is only $5 more than it was during Black Friday last year. If you've been eyeing one of Amazon's larger smart displays, the retailer has also reduced the price of the Echo Show 10 and Echo Show 15. You can get the company's largest smart display for $214.98, down from $279.98. Meanwhile, the Echo Show 10 is currently priced at $185.

In this paper, we describe a first publicly available fine-grained product recognition dataset based on leaflet images. Using advertisement leaflets, collected over several years from different European retailers, we provide a total of 41.6k manually annotated product images in 832 classes. Further, we investigate three different approaches for this fine-grained product classification task, Classification by Image, by Text, as well as by Image and Text. The approach "Classification by Text" uses the text extracted directly from the leaflet product images. We show, that the combination of image and text as input improves the classification of visual difficult to distinguish products. The final model leads to an accuracy of 96.4% with a Top-3 score of 99.2%. We release our code at https://github.com/ladwigd/Leaflet-Product-Classification.