Amazon Opens Registration for University Competition to Advance Conversational AI

Amazon opened registration Thursday for the Alexa Prize, a university competition designed to advance conversational artificial intelligence (AI), it said in a news release. The team with the highest performing “socialbot” will win $500,000, and an additional $1 million will be awarded to the winning team’s university if the students' socialbot can converse “coherently and engagingly with humans for 20 minutes,” said Amazon. A socialbot that can converse coherently for 20 minutes "is unprecedented and at least five times more advanced than state-of-the-art conversational AI,” said Rohit Prasad, head scientist, Amazon Alexa. The competition challenges students to build socialbots that can acquire knowledge and opinions from the web, and "express them in context just as a human would in everyday conversations," said Prasad. The challenge is designed to advance areas of conversational AI including knowledge acquisition, natural language understanding, natural language generation, context modeling, commonsense reasoning and dialog planning, said Amazon. Students will build their socialbots using the Alexa Skills Kit and will have access to conversational topic categories and digital content from multiple sources. The Washington Post agreed to make its complete news feed and comments available to students for noncommercial use, Amazon said. Jeff Bezos is an owner of both companies. As part of the research and judging process, millions of Alexa customers will be able to converse with the socialbots on popular topics by saying, "Alexa, let's chat about (a topic, for example, baseball playoffs, celebrity gossip, scientific breakthroughs, etc.)," Amazon said. After the conversation, Alexa users will give feedback on the experience to help improve the socialbots. The feedback from Alexa users also will be used to help select the socialbots that will advance to the live judging phase. University student teams can submit applications through Oct. 28 and the contest will wrap up at AWS re:invent in November 2017 where winners will be announced, it said. Up to 10 teams will be sponsored by Amazon and receive a $100,000 stipend, Alexa-enabled devices, free AWS (Amazon Web Services) and support from the Alexa team, it said.