Products featured in this Mail Best article are independently selected by our shopping writers. If you make a purchase using links on this page, MailOnline may earn an affiliate commission. To celebrate Amazon Alexa's Birthday, you can currently shop popular Echo devices on sale for as little as £24.99 - so now is the perfect time to get your hands on that gadget you've been eyeing up. Ahead of Black Friday 2021, which officially kicks off on November 27, while these offers last, shoppers can get Amazon Echo Dot smart speakers and Echo Show smart displays with up to 40 per cent off. To celebrate Amazon Alexa's Birthday, you can currently shop popular Echo devices on sale for as little as £24.99

Major Japanese convenience store operator FamilyMart Co. said this week that it has introduced a robot with artificial intelligence that automatically restocks drinks at one of its stores in Tokyo. The AI robot, installed at a store inside the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry building in the Kasumigaseki district of Chiyoda Ward, restocks products by predicting sales based on the time and season. FamilyMart, a subsidiary of major Japanese trader Itochu Corp., aims to reduce the burden on store employees and boost high-value-added work, such as serving customers. The robot was developed by Telexistence Inc., an information technology startup in Tokyo. The device, which comprises an arm, body, rail and other parts, is set between the display shelves and the storage shelves.

The three-year contract will be split across multiple bidders. It replaces the 10-year, $10 billion JEDI cloud-computing contract terminated in July, which was planned to consolidate the Pentagon's patchwork of data systems to give defense personnel better access to real-time information and artificial-intelligence capabilities. The Pentagon said the contract was canceled because of its evolving needs. The project was mired in years of squabbling between Microsoft Corp. MSFT 0.26%, which won the bidding, and Amazon.com Inc., AMZN 2.15% which contended the process was politically motivated under the Trump administration.

Visionstate Corp. is pleased to announce it has entered into an agreement with Artificial Intelligence company Fluido.ai The first deployment of the new technology will be in a large Canadian-based shopping centre. With the retail sector struggling as it recovers from COVID-19 related business interruptions, supply chain challenges, health and safety concerns, and labour shortages – Visionstate's VICCI (virtual, interactive, customer care, interface) kiosks with Fluido.ai The touch-free kiosk works without the need for human labour. The chatbot is voice activated and uses machine learning, so the technology improves as more customers interact with it.

This post is written by Veda Raman, SA Serverless, Casey Gerena, Sr Lab Engineer, Dan Fox, Principal Serverless SA. For real-time machine learning inferencing, customers often have several machine learning models trained for specific use-cases. For each inference request, the model must be chosen dynamically based on the input parameters. This blog post walks through the architecture of hosting multiple machine learning models using AWS Lambda as the compute platform. There is a CDK application that allows you to try these different architectures in your own account.

Cadbury is known for its clever use of personalization in advertising. By further combining the brilliance of AI and ML with a touch of human ingenuity this year, it has outdone itself yet again. The confectionary company engaged in co-creation of their latest promotional tool for Diwali by joining hands with the local mom-and-pop stores at the very grassroot level. With the help of geotagging, Cadbury gives them an opportunity to curate their own customized ad which they can further promote using their established internal networks. The best part of the advertisement is to see the brand ambassador, Shahrukh Khan, literally speaking the name of your local corner store.

Planning the layout of bicycle-sharing stations is a complex process, especially in cities where bicycle sharing systems are just being implemented. Urban planners often have to make a lot of estimates based on both publicly available data and privately provided data from the administration and then use the Location-Allocation model popular in the field. Many municipalities in smaller cities may have difficulty hiring specialists to carry out such planning. This thesis proposes a new solution to streamline and facilitate the process of such planning by using spatial embedding methods. Based only on publicly available data from OpenStreetMap, and station layouts from 34 cities in Europe, a method has been developed to divide cities into micro-regions using the Uber H3 discrete global grid system and to indicate regions where it is worth placing a station based on existing systems in different cities using transfer learning. The result of the work is a mechanism to support planners in their decision making when planning a station layout with a choice of reference cities.

What do you think of when you hear the word automation? None of this is wrong, per se, but we like to add another word when we think about automation: productive. For us, automation is all about giving humans superhero capes. We think about it as a way for productive automated work technologies to amplify humanness and economic productivity. Or, instead of focusing on how automation replaces humans, honing in on how it can improve our work.

Many shipping times are already delayed this year due to supply chain issues and labor shortages. It's best to start shopping now for those on your holiday list instead of waiting for the last possible moment. Best Buy started its holiday deals event early, with Black Friday prices guaranteed--if it gets lower, it will refund you the difference. We think that's a pretty good deal. Below are some of our favorite products discounted so far.

If you want to score Google's Nest devices at a discount before Black Friday arrives, check out Best Buy's sale -- some of them are even available for the lowest price we've seen them sell for across retailers. The Google Nest Audio, for instance, is now listed for $60, which is $40 less than its standard price and is the lowest we've seen for the speaker. In case you missed the chance to purchase the device at that price from B&H Photo in October, here's another chance to do so. The second-gen Google Nest Hub is also on sale for $50, which is only $10 more than what the first-gen Nest Hub goes for these days. We gave the Nest Audio a score of 87 in our review and called it a steal at $100.