Products featured in this Mail Best article are independently selected by our shopping writers. If you make a purchase using links on this page, we may earn an affiliate commission. The Amazon Black Friday 2021 sale is here and if you've been considering buying a smart display or a smart speaker with Alexa then there's never been a better time to invest. Amazon has slashed the price of some of its bestselling gadgets and devices, with discounts of up to 56 per cent, so you can make your home smarter for less. In fact this Black Friday sale has some of the cheapest prices we've ever seen for Amazon devices including just £18.99 for the Echo Dot, the Fire HD 8 Tablet for £39.99 and the Echo Show 5 for just £39.99.

Aside from the weeks leading up to the big game, the Black Friday shopping period is arguably the best time of year to buy a new TV. Whether you're looking for your first OLED set or a budget-friendly smart TV, you'll find many options at cheaper-than-usual prices at Amazon, Best Buy and other retailers. TVs from LG, Sony, Samsung, TCL and others have been discounted this year -- and it's worth noting that while we highlight certain sizes here, you'll likely find that if one size is on sale, other sizes in the same lineup will also be discounted. And if you're not looking to upgrade your TV, there's a bunch of other home theater equipment on sale right now too, including streaming devices, soundbars and more. Here are the best TV deals, along with the best home theater sales, we could find for Black Friday.

Products featured in this Mail Best article are independently selected by our shopping writers. If you make a purchase using links on this page, we may earn an affiliate commission. Keeping hard floors and carpets free from debris and pet hair can feel like a constant losing battle in a busy household. If you're looking to save yourself time and effort ahead of the festive season, then it might be worth following the recommendations of thousands of shoppers who have said farewell to hoovering thanks to the intelligent cleaning power of the eufy BoostIQ RoboVac 15C MAX. Not only does it vacuum your home without assistance, the robot vacuum is small enough to fit underneath your furniture, cleaning where you can't.

With the advent of machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI), how companies conduct business has changed considerably. Such changes have been fueled even further by the conditions of the pandemic lockdowns. Technology has significantly improved system efficiencies and made running a business more cost and time-effective. Advancements in technology have enabled business owners to analyze market opportunities better, automate labor-intensive and time-consuming tasks, and thus improve sales. The retail industry is one of the most significantly influenced sectors when it comes to AI.

New research that I have conducted with my colleagues at the University of Oxford--Felipe Thomaz, Rhonda Hadi and Andrew Stephen--reveals that making chatbots more humanlike is a double-edged sword. On one hand, when customers are neutral, happy or even sad, interacting with humanized chatbots can boost customer satisfaction. Yet, when customers are angry, interacting with humanized chatbots only increases their dissatisfaction, meaning that a company's most unsatisfied customers are often handled the most poorly. More important, this lower satisfaction doesn't just affect the single chat interaction or the customer's feelings about the chatbot itself; it extends to negative feelings toward the entire company and decreases consumers' desire to purchase from that company in the future. Chatbots are becoming more common across a host of industries, as companies replace human customer-service agents on their websites, social-media pages and messaging services.

Recently, adoption of robots in the retail and restaurant industry is finding new hot areas which are geared towards empowering existing staff and handling long term staff shortages. Let's have a look at the industry's viewpoint on this. A recent survey from RetailWire, indicates that 77% of large retailers realize that it's critical to have a clear, executable and budgeted robotics automation strategy for their in-store operations and end customer deliveries projects in the next 18 months. Both restaurants and retailers are in a position to leverage robots for automating tasks, increasing employee productivity and collecting data that can be used to improve business processes and enhance customer experiences. While robots are working behind the scenes to help with inventory management and warehousing, companies are now increasingly bringing robots into roles which involve direct interaction or coexistence with customers.

If you're looking for an affordable robot vacuum to gift this year, one of iRobot's latest may do the trick. The Roomba 694, which came out earlier this year as a replacement for the Roomba 675, has dropped back down to an all-time low of $179. Normally $275, this model was already fairly inexpensive -- especially for an iRobot device -- but this Black Friday sale puts it in line with budget models from the likes of Anker and others. You can manually control the device using those buttons, or you can turn to the mobile app for that. When we tested the Roomba 694 for our budget robot vacuum guide, we found it to be good at cleaning both hard and carpeted floors, thanks in part to iRobot's three-stage cleaning system, and we liked its ability to focus on particularly dirty spots until they were completely clean. One of the on-device buttons even lets you activate a spot-cleaning mode if and when you want the device to clean only a targeted spot.

Early Black Friday deals are already rolling out, with more new sales showing up every day. For 2021, there's concern whether shipping issues will mean less stuff on the shelves for the holidays. As we've already been hearing for months, the global supply chain is seriously backed up with bottlenecks occurring at key points. Hoping to deal with an already difficult situation, retailers stretched out the shopping season as much as they dared, what with shipping timelines stretching to frustrating levels. These supply problems are supposed to be felt acutely in technology, or so the market watchers say.

Co-Founder & CEO of Agara, driving autonomous conversations and helping top brands connect with customers using voice AI to improve CX. Well, we all know that customer focus means more business and revenue. Customer-centric businesses reap 60% more profit than those who don't prioritize delivering a better customer experience. However, the key challenge for retailers -- or any customer-facing business for that matter -- is rapidly evolving customer needs. It all began with consumers walking out of physical stores to enter the world of online shopping.

If you want to be successful in retail, you have to use technology at an early stage and put the customer at the center of all decisions. The digitization and technical progress, especially artificial intelligence (AI), are changing retail market in numerous industrial sectors, including tech, agriculture, studios, product testing, inspection, certification, insurance, and most important, retail. Customers are buying more and more online instead of from traditional stores, having a presence across all relevant sales channels has long been part of everyday life, and innovative business models are becoming increasingly popular. AI enables business models that were barely conceivable just a few years ago. Retail companies should use the changes strategically to get as close as possible to their customers. As a 2019 survey by EY and Microsoft shows, the gap between companies that embrace AI and those that are hesitant is widening.