Don’t get bot hurt. Get bot even.

Thanksgiving didn’t just launch leftovers. It pressed play on holiday spending — the part where your card gets nervous and every brand you’ve ever met blasts a “limited-time deal” with suspicious confidence.

Last month’s Bots on a Budget was all about calming your money brain. This week is the follow-up everyone actually needs, the tiny wins your bot can grab while you’re doing anything else.

No budgets. No spreadsheets. Just financial victories that land without effort.

Your personal price drop psychic

Black Friday and Cyber Monday came and went in a blur of discount chaos — but here’s the twist: those days aren’t always the cheapest. Some products dip later, some drop overnight for no reason, and some hide their best prices in random midweek lulls.

Either way, bots don’t care about retail holidays. They track prices long after the banners disappear.

AI-powered tools like Honey, Capital One Shopping, Keepa and Klarna alerts also plug into price histories and send automatic pings when the number moves.

Your bot can summarize those alerts, predict whether the trend is heading down, and suggest whether to wait or buy.

It’s like having a coupon-obsessed relative who also understands regression models.

Your subscription ghostbuster

December is the month when forgotten subscriptions come back from the dead like they’ve been rehearsing for it.

Bot Hurt confession: One staffer signs up for every Black Friday streaming deal just to binge her favorite holiday movies for a fraction of the cost — then relies on her bot to remind her to cancel before the price snaps back to full freight.

Canceling a service you forgot about is the closest thing to a holiday miracle that doesn’t require baking.

The free tools doing the most

This year’s lineup of $0 helpers is shockingly strong.

• ChatGPT Free: scans receipts, compares prices, plans gifts by personality

• Perplexity Free: fast research and “which option is actually cheaper?” breakdowns

• Capital One Shopping: auto-tests discount codes so you don’t have to

• Klarna price alerts: pings you when that item you swear is never on sale suddenly is

These aren't upgrades — they’re loopholes.

Why even skeptics will say hmm

Because this isn’t AI replacing anyone’s job or narrating dystopia.

It’s AI reminding you that you’re still paying for Paramount+ even though you only watched Scrooged.

Small-money wins add up, especially when the bots are doing the hunting.

💡 🤖 Final Bot Thought

If your money’s going to leave your wallet this month, make every dollar saved feel like a tiny holiday miracle. And the real spirit of the season? Giving — the kind that doesn’t require a shipping label.

As always: zero sponsorships, zero kickbacks. Everything here is based on word-of-mouth, trial runs and more internet sleuthing than we’d like to admit. Bot Hurt remains proudly free.

🤖 💬 Bot Talk: AI learns to ‘listen’ with its eyes

Florida Atlantic University engineers built an AI system that reads American Sign Language in real time — and it’s impressively accurate. Think 98 percent “did that bot just spell my name?” accuracy.

You’ll see it in the YouTube demo.

_{Source: Florida Atlantic University}

Current ASL systems often stumble on look-alike letters such as “A” and “T” or “M” and “N,” according to FAU. Varying lighting conditions, motion blur, different hand sizes and skin tones, and busy backgrounds can also throw off accuracy and make models less reliable across users.

The FAU team combined YOLOv11’s object detection with MediaPipe’s hand-tracking to create a contact-free interpreter that works with a basic webcam. No gloves or sensors, just your hands and a model that stays stable even in uneven lighting.

Since it runs on off-the-shelf hardware and hit 98.2 percent accuracy with minimal latency, it could scale to classrooms, clinics and workplaces, helping bridge communication for the roughly 11 million deaf or hard-of-hearing Americans.

A bot that helps everyone feel heard? Don’t get bot hurt. Get bot even.

🚀 Coming up next week …

Don’t get bot hurt. Get bot even.