If vacuuming is one of your least favorite chores, a robot vacuum can take that largely manual process and make it almost entirely automated. And unlike a few years ago, you don't have to spend a fortune to get a decent robot vacuum today. That being said, it's always advisable to wait for the Black Friday and Cyber Monday time period if you want to get the best deal on a brand new robo-vac. These are the best Black Friday vacuum deals you can get this year. It also works with the iRobot mobile app so you can set cleaning schedules, and it'll automatically return to its base when it needs a recharge.

Black Friday 2024 has arrived and that means it's the best time of the year to save on all things tech. We've been seeing Black Friday deals pop up across the web for weeks now, but today is the day you can bet you're getting the best prices, period. Everything from headphones to game consoles to robot vacuums and accessories are discounted right now, including some of our favorite gadgets of the year. If you're shopping for yourself, or you're hoping to save on some gifts for the holiday season, we've collected the best Black Friday deals on tech here so you don't have to go searching for them. We'll be updating this post throughout Black Friday and the days following, so check back for the latest deals.

It's Thanksgiving Day which means the big holiday--Black Friday, of course--is just one day away. In the next few hours retailers will be slashing prices to kick off the holiday shopping season and clear out their 2024 stock. You don't have to wait to carve the Thanksgiving turkey and watch the Cowboys lose to snag discounts, because we've spotted the best early Black Friday deals. The WIRED team has decades of experience in product testing and a nose for sniffing out the best deals using a suite of price-tracking tools, including our proprietary tracker which pulls discounts on the products we've tested and reviewed throughout the year. For Black Friday, we cross-reference our buying guide recommendations with the latest sale prices to find the best early Black Friday deals on gadgets and gizmos worth owning. Someone from the WIRED Reviews team has tested every product we include in our deals coverage, so you can rest easy knowing we won't highlight low prices on low-quality goods.

There are two (well, technically, three) optimal times of the year to pick up Echo speakers, Kindle ereaders and other Amazon devices: Amazon Prime Day (now multiple days) and Black Friday. While Amazon likes to save its steepest discounts for its members-only shopping event, it's a safe bet that we'll see the same deals (or similar ones) during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This year, we're seeing some of the best prices of the year on all things Amazon, so now's the time to buy if you want to beef up your smart home ecosystem or pick up a gadget as a gift this year. These are the best deals you can get on Amazon devices for Black Friday 2024. Kindle Paperwhite (2024) for 130 ( 30 off): The latest version of the Paperwhite has speedier performance, a higher-contrast screen, a built-in warm light and 12 weeks of battery life.

This year's Black Friday sales are once again a good time to restock on video games and gaming gear on the cheap. There's still too many junky "discounts" out there to count, but if you're looking to add some games to your backlog, pick up a new console or upgrade your desktop with new accessories, we've rounded up a few Black Friday gaming deals that are genuinely decent below. Among the highlights are 75 price drops for the PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch, a 50 cut for the Xbox Series S and a truckload of discounts on games and accessories we recommend. We've dug through reviews and used price history trackers to ensure each offer below is an actual deal, and we'll update this post as new deals pop up over the course of the day. PlayStation 5 (slim) for 424 at Amazon ( 76 off MSRP): This isn't the absolute biggest price drop to date for Sony's console, but larger discounts have been extremely uncommon over the past year. You have a few different purchasing options, too. If you're a Fortnite Person, you can grab a bundle that throws in skins and V-Bucks for that game at no extra cost. Walmart, meanwhile, has a separate bundle that pairs the machine with the recent RPG Dragon Age: The Veilguard or one of EA's sports games for 450. Also available at Best Buy, Target, GameStop and PlayStation Direct, among others. PlayStation 5 Digital Edition (slim) NBA 2K25 bundle for 374 at Amazon ( 76 off): If you have no interest in buying physical media, you can save an extra 50 upfront by going with the PS5's disc-less model. This bundle comes with the latest NBA 2K game as a freebie. If it runs out of stock, you can grab the same Fortnite bundle noted above for the same price.

Earbuds are nice, but a portable speaker shares music with friends. And now for Black Friday, many of our favorite music sharers are on sale. We found deals on many of the speakers we've tested for our various guides and reviews -- and most of those discounts are hitting the lowest prices of the year so far. One of the best deals is the JBL Flip 6, now 50 off. Further down the page you'll see deals we found on smart speakers and soundbars too. Most everything here has been pulled from our Bluetooth speaker buying guide, our smart speaker roundup and other buying advice articles. Here are the best speaker deals we could find for Black Friday.

Black Friday is right around the corner, but the days in which you had to wait for Black Friday proper to get good deals have long been behind us. Now, the holiday shopping season has grown to basically be the entire month of November, and that trend has stuck this year. We've been seeing Black Friday deals pop up across the web since the start of the month, making it a great time to shop for gifts or pick up things you've needed for yourself. In the tech space, Black Friday deals have come for a bunch of tech we've tested and reviewed including wireless earbuds, game consoles, robot vacuums and more. These are the best Black Friday deals we could find at the moment; we'll be updating this post regularly throughout November, so check back for the latest discounts.

Adapting named entity recognition (NER) methods to new domains poses significant challenges. We introduce RapidNER, a framework designed for the rapid deployment of NER systems through efficient dataset construction. RapidNER operates through three key steps: (1) extracting domain-specific sub-graphs and triples from a general knowledge graph, (2) collecting and leveraging texts from various sources to build the NERsocial dataset, which focuses on entities typical in human-robot interaction, and (3) implementing an annotation scheme using Elasticsearch (ES) to enhance efficiency. NERsocial, validated by human annotators, includes six entity types, 153K tokens, and 99.4K sentences, demonstrating RapidNER's capability to expedite dataset creation.

This paper explores the application of a reinforcement learning (RL) framework using the Q-Learning algorithm to enhance dynamic pricing strategies in the retail sector. Unlike traditional pricing methods, which often rely on static demand models, our RL approach continuously adapts to evolving market dynamics, offering a more flexible and responsive pricing strategy. By creating a simulated retail environment, we demonstrate how RL effectively addresses real-time changes in consumer behavior and market conditions, leading to improved revenue outcomes. Our results illustrate that the RL model not only surpasses traditional methods in terms of revenue generation but also provides insights into the complex interplay of price elasticity and consumer demand. This research underlines the significant potential of applying artificial intelligence in economic decision-making, paving the way for more sophisticated, data-driven pricing models in various commercial domains.

LLMs can now act as autonomous agents that interact with digital environments and complete specific objectives (e.g., arranging an online meeting). However, accuracy is still far from satisfactory, partly due to a lack of large-scale, direct demonstrations for digital tasks. Obtaining supervised data from humans is costly, and automatic data collection through exploration or reinforcement learning relies on complex environmental and content setup, resulting in datasets that lack comprehensive coverage of various scenarios. On the other hand, there is abundant knowledge that may indirectly assist task completion, such as online tutorials that were created for human consumption. In this work, we present Synatra, an approach that effectively transforms this indirect knowledge into direct supervision at scale. We define different types of indirect knowledge, and carefully study the available sources to obtain it, methods to encode the structure of direct demonstrations, and finally methods to transform indirect knowledge into direct demonstrations. We use 100k such synthetically-created demonstrations to finetune a 7B CodeLlama, and demonstrate that the resulting agent surpasses all comparably sized models on three web-based task benchmarks Mind2Web, MiniWoB++ and WebArena, as well as surpassing GPT-3.5 on WebArena and Mind2Web. In addition, while synthetic demonstrations prove to be only 3% the cost of human demonstrations (at $0.031 each), we show that the synthetic demonstrations can be more effective than an identical number of human demonstrations collected from limited domains.