Why not spoil your furry friend--and save some bones while you're at it too--with some of our favorite Amazon Pet Day deals. In the great tradition of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Amazon Prime Day, Amazon has expanded these savings extravaganzas to the pet tech sphere. As the pet tech writer here at WIRED, I have strong opinions about which (often pricey) pet gear is worth your hard-earned dough. I've rounded up some of the best deals I've seen so far on some of my favorite pet-related items I've tested. From automatic litter boxes to toys, feeders to fountains, and even DNA testing kits and pet cameras, I've put the best pet-related deals on WIRED-tested gear that I've seen so far below.

Amazon said it has made a "fundamental leap forward in robotics" after developing a robot with a sense of touch that will be capable of grabbing about three-quarters of the items in its vast warehouses. Vulcan – which launches at the US firm's "Delivering the Future" event in Dortmund, Germany, on Wednesday and is to be deployed around the world in the next few years – is designed to help humans sort items for storage and then prepare them for delivery as the latest in a suite of robots which have an ever-growing role in the online retailer's extensive operation. Aaron Parness, Amazon's director of robotics, described Vulcan as a "fundamental leap forward in robotics. It's not just seeing the world, it's feeling it, enabling capabilities that were impossible for Amazon robots until now." The robots will be able to identify objects by touch using AI to work out what they can and can't handle and figuring out how best to pick them up.

Sam's Club is going register-free and introducing an all-digital, AI-powered shopping experience for its customers, a move that has privacy advocates worried that the new AI tool could be used to unfairly target some customers with higher-priced items based on their shopping habits. The all-digital approach started with the reconstruction of a Sam's Club in Grapevine, a suburb of Dallas, that was severely damaged in 2022 by a tornado. When the retail location opened two years later it was the first of its kind to ditch its registers for a "Scan and Go" program that allowed customers to scan each item placed in their physical cart and pay through a mobile app. This program has since been piloted in nine Dallas metro locations and one store in Missouri, Retail Dive reported. Instead of handing a receipt to a Sam's Club employee to review before leaving the store, customers walk through an arch that's equipped with AI-powered cameras to capture images of the items in the cart and electronically match them with the items paid for through the app. Sam's Club did not disclose when the AI technology would be coming to California stores but Sam's Club has outlets in Torrance, Fountain Valley, El Monte and Riverside.

You've begged the scanner to connect. You've turned it off and on again (twice). There's a reason people are ditching old-school scanners for this document-scanner app that's faster, smarter, and doesn't scream when it feeds in paper crooked. The iScanner app doesn't have any of the usual nonsense and only takes up as much space as your iOS device. You can dodge the app's subscription fees with our lifetime offering: Use code SCAN at checkout to get it for 24.99 this week only (reg.

Morrisons has unveiled its newest staff members - in the form of aisle-roaming robots. The retail giant is trialling'Tally' robots at three stores in Wetherby, Redcar and Stockton, to monitor how products are being displayed on shelves. Using advanced AI and computer vision technology, Tally is designed to spot out-of-stock items, pricing errors, and misplaced products. Morrisons' technology manager, Katherine Allanach, called this a'crucial' role. 'It is a crucial but time-consuming task and so Tally aims to allow more time for colleagues to focus on customer service,' she told The Grocer.

Personalized food recommendation systems (Food-RecSys) critically underperform due to fragmented component understanding and the failure of conventional machine learning with vast, imbalanced food data. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promise, current generic Recommendation as Language Processing (RLP) strategies lack the necessary specialization for the food domain's complexity. This thesis tackles these deficiencies by first identifying and analyzing the essential components for effective Food-RecSys. We introduce two key innovations: a multimedia food logging platform for rich contextual data acquisition and the World Food Atlas, enabling unique geolocation-based food analysis previously unavailable. Building on this foundation, we pioneer the Food Recommendation as Language Processing (F-RLP) framework - a novel, integrated approach specifically architected for the food domain. F-RLP leverages LLMs in a tailored manner, overcoming the limitations of generic models and providing a robust infrastructure for effective, contextual, and truly personalized food recommendations.

In Recommender Systems, users often seek the best products through indirect, vague, or under-specified queries, such as "best shoes for trail running". Such queries, also referred to as implicit superlative queries, pose a significant challenge for standard retrieval and ranking systems as they lack an explicit mention of attributes and require identifying and reasoning over complex factors. We investigate how Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate implicit attributes for ranking as well as reason over them to improve product recommendations for such queries. As a first step, we propose a novel four-point schema for annotating the best product candidates for superlative queries called SUPERB, paired with LLM-based product annotations. We then empirically evaluate several existing retrieval and ranking approaches on our new dataset, providing insights and discussing their integration into real-world e-commerce production systems.

OpenAI announced today that users will soon be able to buy products through ChatGPT. The rollout of shopping buttons for AI-powered search queries will come to everyone, whether they are a signed-in user or not. Shoppers will not be able to check out inside of ChatGPT; instead they will be redirected to the merchant's website to finish the transaction. In a prelaunch demo for WIRED, Adam Fry, the ChatGPT search product lead at OpenAI, demonstrated how the updated user experience could be used to help people using the tool for product research decide which espresso machine or office chair to buy. The product recommendations shown to prospective shoppers are based on what ChatGPT remembers about a user's preferences as well as product reviews pulled from across the web.

We have developed a new method to estimate a Next Viewpoint (NV) which is effective for pose estimation of simple-shaped products for product display robots in retail stores. Pose estimation methods using Neural Networks (NN) based on an RGBD camera are highly accurate, but their accuracy significantly decreases when the camera acquires few texture and shape features at a current view point. However, it is difficult for previous mathematical model-based methods to estimate effective NV which is because the simple shaped objects have few shape features. Therefore, we focus on the relationship between the pose estimation and NV estimation. When the pose estimation is more accurate, the NV estimation is more accurate. Therefore, we develop a new pose estimation NN that estimates NV simultaneously. Experimental results showed that our NV estimation realized a pose estimation success rate 77.3\%, which was 7.4pt higher than the mathematical model-based NV calculation did. Moreover, we verified that the robot using our method displayed 84.2\% of products.

Life is about to change on the remote island nation of Tuvalu. To great fanfare, Tuvalu – an entirely cash-based society – has unveiled its first ever ATM, marking its move towards financial modernisation. But while the 10,000 people living in that country may be celebrating no longer having to queue at the bank, I fear their happiness will be short-lived. The world's first ATM was introduced in Britain in 1967, but for me the tyranny of machines that promise convenience but erode human contact really began about 20 years ago, in the form of self-checkouts in our local Sainsbury's. Having watched the Terminator movie franchise during my formative years, I railed prophetically against them, aware that it was just a small slippery slope from "unexpected item in the bagging area" to the extinction of the human race.