Artificial intelligence is pretty versatile. Many of us are already familiar with how the technology can be used to identify objects and create virtual personal assistants. We’re also seeing how some of the more adventurous innovators are using it to automatically build websites and cure social anxiety. But what if all you wanted to do was have a conversation? You know, just, chat. Sometimes functions that seem the simplest can be the hardest to implement, and Amazon wants to encourage young hackers to take on that challenge.
Last week, Amazon announced the instatement of the Alexa Prize, an annual competition aimed at accelerating development in the field of conversational artificial intelligence. Right now, the challenge is geared towards university students. As the name suggests, products will be built around Alexa, which is the voice service behind Amazon’s Echo; a smart speaker created by the company that allows people to use voice commands to execute just about any web-based request.
The inaugural edition of the Alexa Prize tasks participants with creating a “socialbot,” a term that Amazon uses to describe an artificial intelligence capable of conversing coherently with human beings on popular topics and current affairs. Teams will use the Alexa Skills Kit, a suite of APIs for Alexa products, to create the bots.
The competition is basically an attempt to create a version of that friend we all have who can talk endlessly about what’s on the news. To help the bots learn about what’s trending, the Washington Post has made its news feed available to the participants.
The judges chosen to interact with the bots will be those in the Amazon customer base that use an Alexa product. They will be able to initiate a conversation with the chatterbots using the phrase, “Alexa, let’s chat about…” The feedback they provide will be used by the students to enhance their creations as well as to decide the winners of the initial phase of the competition.
The teams that make it to the next stage will congregate at AWS re:Invent, a conference that will be held in November 2017. $500,000 will be given away to the team with the most proficient socialbot. Apart from the winners, 10 teams will have the chance to walk away with a stipend worth $100,000, free AWS packages, and Alexa devices and priority support. There’s also a big $1 million prize for the team that creates a bot capable of holding a conversation for 20 minutes, which would put the social skills of many of us humans to shame.
Registration for the first ever Alexa Prize are open now. University teams interested in taking part in the competition can do so by signing up on the Amazon developer site. The last day to apply is October 28. Participants will be announced and the competition will kick off November 14.
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Feature image courtesy of pymnts.com
Prateek Jose is a writer and engineering undergrad from India with an unhealthy obsession for obscure historical trivia. Conversations about absurdist fiction and the technological singularity make his day. He’s already uploading parts of his brain to servers by writing for websites such as this one.
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Having watched a few things regarding how AI works over the last year or more. I would say that this is something that is not possible. Also, what is considered the “best natural” conversation? That might be judged differently from a lot of people.
This seems like a really cool contest. I was just writing an article on AI and came across this post. I am going to have to dig a little deeper into Google to see if anyone was awarded this prize.
This is a great way to get someone else to do the work for you. Amazon seems like a company that realizes the smartest employee is not working there, yet. Good for them. I hope someone cracks the code and brings home a winner!
There is so much that can be done with this. I am excited to see if any one coder can come up with what Amazon wants for this AI project.
That is a pretty large prize for something that is not going to take long to build. There are nerdy coders out there that were trying to do this to begin with just so they would have someone to talk to.
This should be pretty cool. In the end, if you could have a conversation about something that is current, that would be something else!