Amazon is seeking to build social bots for Alexa with a $2.5 million prize
Amazon is seeking to boost Alexa’s social intelligence by awarding a $2.5 million prize for a new university competition to design and build “socialbots” for the platform. Engineers will use the Alexa Skills Kit to build these artificial socialites.
As part of the competition, the Washington Post, owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, will also be making its corpus available to participants as a tool to train the bots. To evaluate progress, Amazon will be letting Alexa users test the conversational chops of the bots in the wild.
Once it all goes live, users can simply ask Alexa to chat about a specific topic to engage with the socialbots. At the end of a conversation, these same users will submit feedback that will be a key component in determining which teams advance to the final live judging event.
The competition is set to last a year and culminate in the November 2017 AWS re:invent conference. Amazon is making the Alexa Prize an annual event, so by the time winners are announced, next year’s competition will be gearing up.
The team that builds the best socialbot for Alexa will receive 500,000.Theschoolattendedbythewinningteamisalsoeligibleforanadditional1 million, but they will only receive the money if the bot can hold a “coherent and engaging” conversation with humans for 20 minutes.
An additional 1millionwillbesplitupin100,000 increments and given to ten teams as a stipend to finance work. These teams will also be receiving Alexa enabled hardware, AWS services, and support from Alexa engineers. Registration is open now, and interested teams can find competition rules on the Amazon developer website.
