Tesco is fighting back against Amazon with its first "just walk out" store, where it is possible to buy groceries without having to scan items or visit a till. The supermarket's GetGo store in Holborn, central London, follows a small trial of a similar store at Tesco head office in Welwyn Garden City, which has been selling goods to the retailer's staff since 2019. Weight sensors in the shelves work with an AI system that can track an individual's movement around the store and monitor the items they pick up via cameras, which follow each shopper. The AI system works by building a unique skeleton outline of each person rather than using facial recognition. Once inside, shoppers can pick up the items they want without scanning them.

Have you ever wondered how your business can respond to customers' complaints and resolve issues in the late part of the night? Are you constantly worried about your business not having enough customer support strength? Does your company have a peak sales period, e.g., Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and you do not want to hire additional staff to cater to the workload? What if I told you a single chatbot could solve all your business needs. Chatbots are opening up a new era of business-customer interaction.

The Transform Technology Summits start October 13th with Low-Code/No Code: Enabling Enterprise Agility. SparkBeyond, a company that helps analysts use AI to generate new answers to business problems without requiring any code, today has released its product SparkBeyond Discovery. The company aims to automate the job of a data scientist. Typically, a data scientist looking to solve a problem may be able to generate and test 10 or more hypotheses a day. With SparkBeyond's machine, millions of hypotheses can be generated per minute from the data it leverages from the open web and a client's internal data, the company says.

Learning to converse using only a few examples is a great challenge in conversational AI. The current best conversational models, which are either good chit-chatters (e.g., BlenderBot) or goal-oriented systems (e.g., MinTL), are language models (LMs) fine-tuned on large conversational datasets. Training these models is expensive, both in terms of computational resources and time, and it is hard to keep them up to date with new conversational skills. A simple yet unexplored solution is prompt-based few-shot learning (Brown et al. 2020) which does not require gradient-based fine-tuning but instead uses a few examples in the LM context as the only source of learning. In this paper, we explore prompt-based few-shot learning in dialogue tasks. We benchmark LMs of different sizes in nine response generation tasks, which include four knowledge-grounded tasks, a task-oriented generations task, three open-chat tasks, and controlled stylistic generation, and five conversational parsing tasks, which include dialogue state tracking, graph path generation, persona information extraction, document retrieval, and internet query generation. The current largest released LM (GPT-J-6B) using prompt-based few-shot learning, and thus requiring no training, achieves competitive performance to fully trained state-of-the-art models. Moreover, we propose a novel prompt-based few-shot classifier, that also does not require any fine-tuning, to select the most appropriate prompt given a dialogue history. Finally, by combining the power of prompt-based few-shot learning and a Skill Selector, we create an end-to-end chatbot named the Few-Shot Bot (FSB), which automatically selects the most appropriate conversational skill, queries different knowledge bases or the internet, and uses the retrieved knowledge to generate a human-like response, all using only few dialogue examples per skill.

Today, we're excited to announce a new similar items recommendation recipe (aws-similar-items) in Amazon Personalize that helps you leverage your users' interaction histories and what you know about the items in your catalog to deliver relevant recommendations. Across Amazon, we provide personalized experiences for each of our users, and based on a user's interests, we change their experiences and the items they see. Visitors are often recommended items that users with similar histories have interacted with. These recommendations are called similar items, and they help users discover items relevant to what they're watching or purchasing. By taking into account the item a user is engaged with, we can improve engagement and conversion.

If you missed the chance to grab the new Echo Show 8 during Amazon's Prime Day event in July, you may want to check the smart display's listing on Amazon. That's only $5 more than what it was listed for during Prime Day, and it's certainly not a bad deal for a relatively new device that was only released in June. We gave the Echo Show 8 a score of 87 in our review. Between this device and its smaller 5-inch sibling, it received more upgrades from the previous generation, including a faster octa-core processor. It also has a 13-megapixel wide-angle camera that's a huge improvement over the previous version's one-megapixel sensor.

Shopify is a technological tide in the digital advancement of e-commerce. It is not only a tool or a mere feature. Instead, it is a complete solution for people who wish to either start their online store or want to revamp existing services in this realm. Shopify is quite popular for its unique online store designs, branding tools, customized services, and applications to make insightful decisions based on real-time reporting and other ready-made programs. You can also develop your brick-and-mortar store with a Shopify POS system and related paraphernalia.

Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that enables developers and data scientists to quickly and easily build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models at any scale. Typically, you can use the pre-built and optimized training and inference containers that have been optimized for AWS hardware. Although those containers cover many deep learning workloads, you may have use cases where you want to use a different framework or otherwise customize the contents of your OS libraries within the container. To accommodate this, SageMaker provides the flexibility to train models using any framework that can run in a Docker container. This functionality enables you to use existing SageMaker training capabilities such as training jobs, hyperparameter tuning, and Managed Spot Training.

Adorama had a good sale on the latest Apple TV 4K last week, and now it's Amazon's turn. The online retailer has the 2021 set-top box for $160 right now, which is just about a record low. You'll get the sale price thanks to a combination of a discount on the device itself, plus an automatically applied coupon that knocks an additional $9.01 off the price at checkout. The Apple TV 4K is, admittedly, more expensive than most other streaming devices but we consider it to be the best splurge pick right now. It's also the best option if you live within the Apple ecosystem.

The Transform Technology Summits start October 13th with Low-Code/No Code: Enabling Enterprise Agility. Four in five (79%) retailers have little or no personalization or recommendation functionality on their commerce site, and only 26% noted the use of AI to optimize search results' relevance. Algolia, which makes an API platform for search and dynamic experiences, revealed its second annual State of Search Report, which includes insights from 900 technical and business decision makers from omnichannel, as well as from digital retailers with global revenues of over $100 million, exploring the current usage, investment, and value of search technologies. The State of Search Report reveals the impact of search on a variety of key areas, including conversion rates, user experiences, demand surges, achieving a headless architecture, and more. The report found that only 13% of retailers claim to offer shoppers an advanced search experience, which would create a clear competitive advantage.