The Echo Show 5 is the perfect gateway to smart tech--and now it's on sale. Purchases you make through our links may earn us a commission. Life gets so hectic sometimes it helps to have an assistant. With the Echo Show 5, that's essentially what you'll be getting: A remarkably resourceful buddy who's always down to help you with your errands and to-do list--all you have to do is ask. As one of Amazon's best Prime Day 2020 deals, Prime members can get this truly marvelous smart display at a major discount--and that's just where the fun begins.

We're excited to announce new efficiency improvements for Amazon Personalize. These improvements decrease the time required to train solutions (the machine learning models trained with your data) by up to 40% and reduce the latency for generating real-time recommendations by up to 30%. Amazon Personalize enables you to build applications with the same machine learning (ML) technology used by Amazon.com for real-time personalized recommendations--no ML expertise required. Amazon Personalize provisions the necessary infrastructure and manages the entire ML pipeline, including processing the data, identifying features, using the best algorithms, and training, optimizing, and hosting the models. When serving recommendations, minimizing the time your system takes to generate and serve a recommendation improves conversion.

If you're not keen on participating in Prime Day, you can still save a ton on gadgets, home tech and more at other retailers like Best Buy and Walmart. The best part about shopping at other retailers today is that most of them have made their sales available to all -- no subscription or membership required. Here are the best "anti-Prime Day" tech deals we found across the web. Samsung's iPad Pro competitors that just came out last month are $100 off at Best Buy. The Galaxy Tab S7 is down to $549 while the Tab S7 is down to $749.

Amazon Prime Day looks a lot different this year, for more reasons than one. It's not in July, and we're all months-deep in a pandemic that has caused many of us to stay at home and pinch our pennies a little bit harder. Here on the WIRED Gear team, we scrolled through thousands of deals to find a way to save money on some of our favorite whizbangs and gizmos. If you're looking for ways to make cooking a little easier, or to get motivated to get moving, read on. Note: We strike through items that sell out or rise in price as we update this guide.

If you like a bargain, you're going to love what Amazon are offering in their Prime Day 2020 sale. Along with incredible savings on top electronics, homeware items, toys and beauty buys, the mega-site is slashing the prices of some of their best Amazon devices. Right now, you can buy Amazon's bestselling and most popular smart speaker, the 3rd generation Echo Dot for just $18.99 - that's a huge saving of 69 per cent. It's voice-controlled with Alexa so you can just ask for music, news, information and more. You can also call almost anyone, and control compatible smart home devices with your voice.

If you like a bargain, you're going to love what Amazon are offering in their Prime Day 2020 sale. Along with incredible savings on top electronics, homeware items, toys and beauty buys, the mega-site is slashing the prices of some of their best Amazon devices. Right now, you can buy Amazon's bestselling and most popular smart speaker, the 3rd generation Echo Dot for just £18.99 - that's a huge saving of 69 per cent off the RRP. It's voice-controlled with Alexa so you can just ask for music, news, information and more. You can also call almost anyone, and control compatible smart home devices with your voice.

The grocery chain and agency 360i recently launched a Twitter account called Chefbot that can identify up to three foods in user-submitted images and search a database of recipes for the best match. The makers claim the bot is trained to recognize 2,000 ingredients and pulls from a log of around 20,000 recipes. While the tool is fairly rudimentary for now, Kroger has big plans to grow it into something more sophisticated over time, along with 360i and tech partners Coffee Labs and Clarifai. The creators plan to incorporate every interaction the bot has into its training data in order to make future iterations more accurate at identifying foods and customizing recipes. "Over time, Chefbot will continuously learn and improve, and we're excited about how the experience will evolve and can eventually integrate into Kroger's mobile app," Menno Kluin, chief creative officer at 360i, said.

If you're waiting for Amazon Prime Day to kick off tomorrow, you may want to take advantage of the deals that other retailers already have going on. Walmart has already kicked off its own "anti-Prime Day" savings event and with it comes the best price we've seen on the Lenovo Smart Clock. Right now, Walmart has the smart alarm clock for $39, which is $1 cheaper than its previous low and 50 percent off its normal price. This little gadget has gotten quite popular since its release last year. We gave it a score of 87 for its charming design, ambient light sensor, sunrise alarm feature and lack of camera.

The present-day world of online retail behemoths of Amazon, Argos and Asos etc undeniably leaves a small to medium sized businesses (SMEs) with a clear disadvantage when it comes to eCommerce. Despite their relative lack of exposure and customer loyalty there are, however, a number of ways that an SME can compete with the big dogs. One of these is through customer experience – something that AI chatbot perfectly facilitate. Especially when it comes to one of the deadliest challenges for any retailer: seasonal economic fluctuations. Seasonal changes massively shift the retail market and are extra testing to an SME that relies on a much smaller customer base.

The COVID-19 is impacting e-commerce in lasting ways. Over the last four months, the move to online shopping has accelerated and expanded into categories such as groceries and home improvement. Consumers under lockdown are spending more time online, researching, and shopping. While e-commerce revenues have surged overall, economic uncertainty is shifting demand to essentials, typically lower-margin products and categories. Retailers have been investing in AI technology to better understand consumer behavior over the last few years.