Introducing the Alexa Prize: $2.5 Million to Advance Conversational Artificial Intelligence
September 29 2016 - 1:00PM
Business Wire
Registration is now open for universities to
build a socialbot on Alexa and compete to win a $500,000 prize
An additional $1 million prize for a socialbot
that achieves the grand challenge of conversing coherently and
engagingly with humans for 20 minutes
(NASDAQ: AMZN)—Today, Amazon announced the Alexa Prize, an
annual university competition dedicated to accelerating the field
of conversational artificial intelligence (AI). The goal of the
inaugural competition is to build a “socialbot” on Alexa that will
converse with people about popular topics and news events. The team
with the highest-performing socialbot will win a $500,000 prize.
Additionally, a prize of $1 million will be awarded to the winning
team’s university if their socialbot achieves the grand challenge
of conversing coherently and engagingly with humans for 20
minutes.
Teams of university students can submit applications now and the
contest will conclude at AWS re:invent in November 2017, where the
winners will be announced. Up to ten teams will be sponsored by
Amazon and receive a $100,000 stipend, Alexa-enabled devices, free
AWS services, and support from the Alexa team.
Students will build their socialbots using the Alexa Skills Kit
(ASK), which tens of thousands of developers are already using to
build new skills on Alexa. Participants will have access to
conversational topic categories and digital content from multiple
sources, including The Washington Post, which has agreed to make
its complete news feed and comments available to the students
for non-commercial use. As part of the research and judging
process, millions of Alexa customers will have the opportunity 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.).” Following the
conversation, Alexa users will give feedback on the experience to
provide valuable input to the students for improving their
socialbots. The feedback from Alexa users will also be used to help
select the best socialbots to advance to the final, live judging
phase.
This challenge will advance several areas of conversational AI
including knowledge acquisition, natural language understanding,
natural language generation, context modeling, commonsense
reasoning, and dialog planning. Through the innovative work of
students, Alexa customers will have novel, engaging
conversations.
“The Alexa Prize 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
Rohit Prasad, Vice President and Head Scientist, Amazon Alexa. “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. This challenge and the
immediate feedback students will receive on their best ideas from
millions of engaged Alexa customers will make what we previously
thought impossible, possible.”
Here’s what experts are saying about the Alexa Prize:
- “Human capacity for language is an
instinct, but it’s something that must be taught to machines,” said
Steven Pinker, Scientist, Psychologist, Linguist, and Johnstone
Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard
University. “Everyday conversations that require context and
understanding of the world come naturally to humans. Machines don’t
have those advantages, which makes the Alexa Prize a particularly
complex challenge for participants to solve.”
- “People are social beings. We naturally
want to perceive bots as social beings. As we create bots capable
of engaging in helpful social interactions, we will unlock their
potential to improve our learning, healing, wellness, and quality
of life,” said Maja Mataric, Chaired Professor and Founding
Director of the USC Robotics and Autonomous Systems Center. “The
Alexa Prize can help to get us closer to that goal by supporting
the development of technologies for social conversation. The Alexa
Prize can be a key enabler of today’s students and researchers
undertaking this major technical challenge."
- “People talk with each other regularly
by exchanging stories about everyday events,” said Roger
Schank, Professor Emeritus from Yale, Northwestern, and
Stanford. “Something you say reminds me of something that I
now want to say. Having the context to discuss everyday topics
comes naturally to humans, but must be learned by conversational
AI. I am excited about the Alexa Prize and the scientific advances
that will emerge from the contest.”
- “Conversing for 20 minutes is difficult
for most humans and an extraordinarily ambitious challenge for bots
that are learning to converse like us,” said Dan Jurafsky,
Professor and Chair of Linguistics and Professor of Computer
Science at Stanford University. “The Alexa Prize will encourage
student researchers to come up with great ideas for leveraging
real-world conversational AI technologies like Alexa to create
software that can converse as engagingly as humans. The immediate
feedback from Alexa users will be a huge boost in helping students
improve their algorithms."
For submission guidelines and Official Rules for the Alexa Prize
please visit https://developer.amazon.com/alexaprize.
About Amazon
Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather
than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to
operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews,
1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment
by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets,
Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and
services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit
www.amazon.com/about.
View source
version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160929005357/en/
Amazon.com, Inc.Media Hotline,
206-266-7180Amazon-pr@amazon.comwww.amazon.com/pr
Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN)
Historical Stock Chart
From Mar 2024 to Apr 2024
Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN)
Historical Stock Chart
From Apr 2023 to Apr 2024