Alexa Prize is a competition for university students dedicated to accelerating the field of conversational AI.
The program, which originally launched in 2016 to address the challenge of achieving natural, sustained, coherent, and engaging open-domain dialogues with Alexa, now comprises three challenges: SocialBot, in university teams create an Alexa skill that can converse coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics and news events; TaskBot, a competition that began in 2021 with teams creating a conversational agent that assists customers in completing tasks requiring multiple steps; and SimBot, a competition focused on helping advance development of next-generation virtual assistants that will assist humans in completing real-world tasks.
In the first four years of the SocialBot challenge, teams from the University of Washington, the University of California, Davis, Emory University, and Czech Technical University in Prague have won the competition.
The TaskBot Challenge, launched in 2021 as the first conversational AI challenge to incorporate multimodal customer experiences, is currently underway. Ten university teams are currently participating, with winners to be announced later this year.
The SimBot Challenge, which was also launched in 2021, is also underway. The 10 teams competing in this challenge were recently announced.
Follow Amazon Science and the #AlexaPrize hashtag on social media to get the latest updates on each of the competitions, and about the teams competing in them.