Social

SocialBot Grand Challenge FAQs

Frequently asked questions about the challenge.
General
General
What is a SocialBot?
In the context of Alexa Prize, a SocialBot is an Alexa skill that can engage customers in a conversation about popular topics such as entertainment, sports, politics, technology, and fashion.
Can I choose to build any kind of conversational bot?
No, this competition focuses solely on SocialBots. Your SocialBot will need to converse about a wide range of popular societal topics and current events, and not only topics of your choosing. You will develop your own technologies relevant to your approach, such as natural language understanding, dialog management, knowledge acquisition, commonsense reasoning, conversational planning, machine learning, natural language generation, etc. Far-field automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) will be provided by Amazon, along with additional data, models, and tools.
What will my SocialBot do?
Your SocialBot will be an Alexa skill that can converse coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics and current events. If your SocialBot advances to the pertinent stage of the competition, Alexa users in the U.S. may ask to converse with your SocialBot about topics of interest to them, such as baseball playoffs, celebrity gossip, or scientific breakthroughs. For example:
  • User: Let’s chat about the Mars Mission.
  • SocialBot: There are multiple Mars missions, some public and some private.
  • User: Who do you think will succeed?
  • SocialBot: I think more than one will succeed. The first one to get to Mars will open the doors for others.
  • User: I’d love to go to Mars.
  • SocialBot: Me too. Luckily I can hitch a ride on any computer.
  • User: That’s very funny.
  • SocialBot: The biggest challenge isn’t technology, it’s funding. It will cost $500 billion to send humans to Mars.
Your SocialBot will continue turn-by-turn interaction, starting with a topic the user asked for, until the user chooses to stop. Like an everyday human conversation, the interaction may shift naturally to related topics, as in the above example, but the conversation should remain coherent, relevant, and engaging. Your SocialBot may suggest topics to keep the conversation flowing. The goal is to keep the conversation from deteriorating to the point where the user loses interest.
How will I build my SocialBot?
You will use the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) to build an Alexa skill, hosted on AWS Lambda, that will create the end-to-end conversational experience for a user. Using the provided APIs, your skill will receive as input the text of the user’s utterance, and produce as output a text sentence that will be spoken to the user. You do not need to tackle ASR (automatic speech recognition) or TTS (text to speech). You will also be provided with the CoBot Toolkit (a conversational bot toolkit), a software development kit that works with ASK and was built specifically for Alexa Prize teams to reduce the involved engineering in setting up a SocialBot and allow teams to focus on the science.


Your skill will need to determine an appropriate response at each turn of the conversation. It will also need to keep up with current news and events using the provided data sources. You may use additional data sources or libraries if you wish, subject to the terms described in the Official Rules.
What is the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK)?
The Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) is a collection of free, self-service APIs, tools, documentation, and code samples that make it fast and easy for you to add skills to Alexa. Your team will use ASK to build, deploy, and test a SocialBot that is capable of conversing with millions of Alexa users.
Competition details
What is the goal of the challenge?
The goal of the SocialBot Grand challenge is to advance several areas of conversational AI including natural language understanding (NLU), context modeling, dialog management, commonsense reasoning, natural language generation (NLG), and knowledge acquisition. The grand challenge objective is to create a SocialBot that converses coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics for 20 minutes while achieving a user rating of at least 4.0/5.0.
How will winners be selected?
Through various phases of the competition, SocialBots will be evaluated based on feedback from Alexa users and assessment by Amazon.


Following the initial feedback period, SocialBots that have been certified and published will be evaluated on criteria such as the average interaction rating, uptime requirements, and ability to filter offensive content in order to advance to the Semifinals Interaction Period.



During the semifinals interaction period, Alexa customers will evaluate the semifinalist SocialBots. The two SocialBots with the highest Semifinals Interaction Rating Average and up to three more SocialBots selected by Amazon will advance to the finals.



Teams that advance to and complete the Semifinals Interaction Period, regardless of whether they advanced to the Finals Event, will be eligible to compete for Scientific Invention and Innovation Prizes based on the level of scientific invention and innovation demonstrated by each Entrant Team throughout the Competition.



The Teams whose SocialBots attain the three highest Composite Scores during the finals event will be the winners of the Overall Performance Prizes.
Will this competition be judged like a Turing Test?
No. The goal of the Alexa Prize is to create SocialBots that engage in interesting, human-like conversations, not to make them indistinguishable from a human when compared side-by-side. While the SocialBots built for the Alexa Prize will be human-like in some respects, they will be very different in others, and could easily reveal themselves in a Turing Test. For example, SocialBots may have ready access to much more information than a human. Asking the SocialBots to act like a human could diminish the customer experience and hinder the efforts of the participants to build the best SocialBot to further conversational AI.
When and where is the finals event?
The finals event will be held in July 2023 at a location to be determined, with a science invention and innovation presentation review to follow. The competition results will be announced in August 2023.
Can we use other funding to help us participate in this challenge?
Yes, you may use other funding to support your team, subject to the terms described in the Official Rules. External funding must be disclosed to Amazon.
Will Alexa customers be able to engage with our SocialBot?
Your team will be required to submit its SocialBot for certification and publication by the Amazon Alexa team. After certification, you will enter the Internal Amazon Beta Period, where Amazon employees will test your SocialBot and provide feedback. After the Internal Amazon Beta Period, we will allow Alexa users to try your SocialBot and provide feedback to you. Amazon may impose requirements that the SocialBots must meet before they will be made available to Alexa users. Such requirements may include, among other things, a minimum average customer rating, uptime requirements, or the ability to consistently filter offensive content.
Which Alexa users will be able to interact with the SocialBots, and what languages must they support?
SocialBots will be made available to Alexa users in the United States or who select the United States as their preferred marketplace. Your team must build its SocialBot using U.S. English.
Will we publish our research from the Alexa Prize?
Yes. Publishing research papers as an outcome of your work on Alexa Prize is required for all teams participating in the competition, although teams may not publish Amazon confidential information, as described in the Official Rules. The Alexa Prize requires all teams to submit a technical paper for the Alexa Prize proceedings. Your SocialBot will not be selected for the finals if your team does not submit a technical paper for Alexa Prize proceedings. Papers will be published online at the end of the competition and made publicly available.

Teams may also publish research papers in third-party publications and conferences, as long as all papers are provided to Amazon for review at least two weeks before the submission deadlines and no research papers are published before the Alexa Prize proceedings are published, unless Amazon approves otherwise in writing.
Who will own the intellectual property rights in my submission?
You will retain ownership over your SocialBot. Amazon will have a non-exclusive license to any technology or software you develop in connection with the competition. See the Official Rules for details.
Eligibility
Who can apply to participate?
The Alexa Prize is open to full-time students enrolled in an accredited university, with the exception of universities in Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, the region of Crimea, and where prohibited by law (see Official Rules). Proof of enrollment will be required to participate.
Can I participate if I don’t attend a university?
No. The Alexa Prize is open only to full-time enrolled university students.
Do I need to be enrolled in a university program throughout my participation in the competition?
All participating team members must remain full-time students in good standing at their university while participating in the competition.
Do I need to be a certain age?
Participants must be at or above the age of majority in the country, state, province, or jurisdiction of residence at the time of entry.
Can I enroll if a family member is an Amazon employee?
Immediate family members and household members of Amazon employees, directors, and contractors are not eligible to participate. See Official Rules for additional restrictions.
Teams
How many teams will be selected to participate?
All applications will be reviewed and evaluated by Amazon. Up to ten teams will be selected and sponsored by Amazon. All teams will receive a $250,000 grant intended to support two full-time students and a month of faculty time, free Alexa devices, and free AWS hosting including access to CPU and GPU based machines, SQL and NoSQL databases, and object storage. See Official Rules for details.
How many team members can our team have?
There is no minimum or maximum number of team members. All team members must be enrolled in their university throughout their participation. All teams will receive a $250,000 grant regardless of how many members are on the team. We recommend a team with four to six students with diverse fields of study or areas of expertise.
Can students from different universities be on the same team?
No. Teams must be comprised of students attending the same university.
Can one university have more than one team?
Yes, universities may have more than one team. Multiple teams cannot have the same faculty advisor.
Can I participate on two separate teams?
No. You can only be a part of one team for the duration of the competition.
Can undergraduate and graduate students work together?
Yes, teams may be comprised of undergraduate and graduate students.
Do I need a faculty advisor?
All teams must nominate a faculty advisor and include the faculty advisor’s consent in the applications.
What is the role of the faculty advisor?
Faculty advisors will advise students on technical directions and be a sounding board for new ideas, similar to a graduate school advisor. They will also act as the official representative from the university for this competition.
Can we add or remove team members during the competition?
During the competition, there will be a period of time during which faculty advisors may request to remove or add members to the team, subject to approval by Amazon. See Official Rules for details.
Can we discuss our SocialBot with faculty or students who aren’t on our team?
Only team members may work on their SocialBots. However, the faculty advisor and other students and faculty members at your university may provide support and advice to your team and may co-author technical publications and research papers.
Application process
How do we apply?
Begin the application via YouNoodle.
What do we need to apply?
Once you have selected your team members, team leader, and faculty sponsor, you are ready to begin the application process.
Do all team members have to apply?
Each team must have a team lead, who should submit only one application on behalf of the whole team. Your application must include all of your team members’ information.
Is there an application fee?
There is no application fee.
How will teams be selected to participate?
All applications will be reviewed. Teams will be selected by Amazon based on the following criteria: (1) the potential scientific contribution to the field; (2) the technical merit of the approach; (3) the novelty of the idea; and (4) an assessment of the team’s ability to execute against their plan. Please be sure to provide enough detail in your application to enable evaluation of your proposal.
Prizes
What are the prizes for winning the competition?
Overall Performance Prize: For the three teams that build the SocialBot with the highest overall performance, the first-place team will win $250,000, the second-place team will win $50,000, and the third-place team will win $25,000. These prizes will be paid directly to the students on each winning team.


Scientific Invention and Innovation Prize: For the three teams that demonstrate the most scientific invention and innovation throughout the competition, the first-place team will win $250,000, the second-place team will win $50,000, and the third-place team will win $25,000. These prizes will be paid directly to the students on each winning team.



Grand Prize: If and only if the SocialBot of the team that wins the first-place Overall Performance Prize also achieves the grand challenge of conversing coherently and engagingly with humans for 20 minutes in at least two-thirds of its conversations at the finals event and achieves a 4.0 or higher composite score, that team’s university will be awarded a $1 million research grant.



See Official Rules for details.
Do we get a stipend and devices to participate in the Alexa Prize?
Up to ten teams will be sponsored to participate in the competition. Each sponsored team’s university will receive a $250,000 research grant to help fund the team’s participation.


The sponsorship includes Alexa-enabled devices, free AWS services to support the development of the team’s SocialBot, and support from the Alexa Prize team.
How can the grant be spent?
The grant is intended to support two full-time students for the duration of the competition and one month of the faculty advisor’s salary. No more than 35% of the research grant may be allocated to administrative fees. If your team would like to use the funds in another manner, your faculty advisor must receive approval from Amazon before doing so.
How will the prizes be distributed among a team?
Each Overall Performance Prize and the Scientific Invention and Innovation Prize will be distributed equally among the members of each winning team.
Timeline
What are the key milestones of the competition?
Teams must submit their applications by October 5, 2022. Teams selected to participate in the competition will be notified in October of November 2022. The competition will run from about November 2022 through August 2023. See Official Rules for details.

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IN, KA, Bengaluru
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Applied Scientist III, AGI Responsible AI (RAI)
US, CA, Sunnyvale
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Principal Audio Scientist, Fauna
US, NY, New York
Fauna Robotics is building capable, safe, and delightful robots for everyday life, and voice is one of the most natural ways people will interact with them. Cloud speech and language models are good and getting better, but they can only work with the audio they receive, and a robot is a hard place to listen. Its microphones sit beside motors, fans, and moving joints. It speaks through its own loudspeaker while people talk over it. It moves, turns, and shares a room with several people at once. We are hiring a Principal Audio Scientist to be Fauna's technical authority on how our robots hear. You will design, prototype, and ship the hardest algorithms in the robot's audio system. You will set the audio architecture that other engineers build on, shape hardware decisions across robot generations, mentor the engineers and scientists working on audio, and be the person teams come to when the robot can't hear. Key job responsibilities - Set the long-range science roadmap and technical architecture for the robot's audio system, and serve as Fauna's primary technical authority on robot hearing - Design and implement suppression of the robot's own noise from motors, fans, and moving joints - Design and implement echo cancellation for the robot's own voice, so people can interrupt it naturally - Develop multi-microphone processing that holds up as the robot and the people around it move, including locating who is speaking so the robot can turn toward them - Make on-robot listening decisions robust to internal and external noise sources: wake word, voice activity, and whether speech is directed at the robot - Drive microphone and speaker placement, enclosure acoustics, and vibration isolation decisions with mechanical, electrical, and industrial design, backed by your own measurements - Design the robot-specific data collection and evaluation methods to validate the performance of our audio design - Present audio science and its tradeoffs to senior leadership and partner teams - Mentor scientists and engineers, raising the scientific bar for audio across the organization through design reviews, code reviews, and hiring
Robotics/AI Motor Control Scientist, Fauna
US, NY, New York
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(Senior) AI Engineer - Reinforcement Learning Manipulation, RIVR
CH, Zurich
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Applied Scientist, TSI Science
US, WA, Seattle
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Applied Scientist, AGI/AI Security
US, NY, New York
We are seeking an Applied Scientist to contribute to research and development of novel security validation and monitoring techniques for AI systems at scale. You will own and contribute to four critical work-streams: 1. Real-Time Agent Monitoring Design and implement scientific approaches for continuous behavioral analysis of AI agents in production—detecting anomalous actions, prompt injection exploitation, and policy violations in real time. 2. Protection & Automated Remediation Invent and deliver novel protection technologies and automated remediation techniques building on research in security, cryptography, privacy, automated reasoning, and others domains, to enable safe and secure agentic AI models and AI applications. 3. AI Application and Capabilities Validation Invent and deliver scalable methodologies for security testing of AI applications and AI capabilities (e.g. MCP, skills), including adversarial robustness evaluation, safety guardrail bypass detection, tool-use authorization boundaries, and trust boundary verification. 4. AI Asset Discovery & Inventory Research and build scalable techniques to automatically discover, identify, and catalog all AI-enabled applications, services, and capabilities across the company—maintaining a comprehensive, continuously updated database of AI assets. Key job responsibilities Invent • Identify and frame new research challenges in AI security where problems are ill-defined and require novel scientific paradigms at the product level. • Contribute to the team's scientific agenda for agent monitoring, protection, remediation, validation research, and AI asset discovery. • Publish research results at peer-reviewed internal and external venues (e.g., USENIX Security, ACM CCS, IEEE S&P, NeurIPS, ICML security workshops, ICSE, PETS) when appropriate. • Articulate key scientific challenges of current and future AI security threats and deliver novel research to address them. • Design, implementation, and successful delivery of scientifically complex security solutions into production—both brand new systems and evolutions of existing ones. • Write significant portions of critical-path code for detection models, validation engines, protection technologies, and asset discovery / classification systems. • Assess and select appropriate technologies (e.g., data protection, private inference, graph-based anomaly detection, NLP-based service classification, code/traffic analysis for AI fingerprinting) for production systems. • Use best practices in scientific methodology and software engineering across the team; provide insightful peer reviews of code, design, and architecture artifacts. • Deliver solutions that are inventive, maintainable, scalable, and extensible. Influence • Autonomously drive discussions with security engineers, software engineers, product managers, and scientist peers across multiple teams. • Build consensus on larger cross-team security initiatives and factor complex efforts into independent workstreams. • Identify and resolve endemic problems, including areas where current security tooling limits innovation of partner teams. • Contribute to the broader internal and external scientific communities as a subject matter expert in AI security. About the team Diverse Experiences Amazon Security values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying. Why Amazon Security? At Amazon, security is central to maintaining customer trust and delivering delightful customer experiences. Our organization is responsible for creating and maintaining a high bar for security across all of Amazon’s products and services. We offer talented security professionals the chance to accelerate their careers with opportunities to build experience in a wide variety of areas including cloud, devices, retail, entertainment, healthcare, operations, and physical stores. Inclusive Team Culture In Amazon Security, it’s in our nature to learn and be curious. Ongoing DEI events and learning experiences inspire us to continue learning and to embrace our uniqueness. Addressing the toughest security challenges requires that we seek out and celebrate a diversity of ideas, perspectives, and voices. Training & Career Growth We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, training, and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional. Work/Life Balance We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why flexible work hours and arrangements are part of our culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve.
Applied Scientist II, Last Mile Science
IN, KA, Bangalore
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Senior Applied Scientist, Fauna
US, NY, New York
We are seeking an Applied Scientist to lead the development of evaluation frameworks and data collection protocols for robotic capabilities. In this role, you will focus on designing how we measure, stress-test, and improve robot behavior across a wide range of real-world tasks. Your work will play a critical role in shaping how policies are validated and how high-quality datasets are generated to accelerate system performance. You will operate at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and human-in-the-loop systems, building the infrastructure and methodologies that connect teleoperation, evaluation, and learning. This includes developing evaluation policies, defining task structures, and contributing to operator-facing interfaces that enable scalable and reliable data collection. The ideal candidate is highly experimental, systems-oriented, and comfortable working across software, robotics, and data pipelines, with a strong focus on turning ambiguous capability goals into measurable and actionable evaluation systems. Key job responsibilities - Design and implement evaluation frameworks to measure robot capabilities across structured tasks, edge cases, and real-world scenarios - Develop task definitions, success criteria, and benchmarking methodologies that enable consistent and reproducible evaluation of policies - Create and refine data collection protocols that generate high-quality, task-relevant datasets aligned with model development needs - Build and iterate on teleoperation workflows and operator interfaces to support efficient, reliable, and scalable data collection - Analyze evaluation results and collected data to identify performance gaps, failure modes, and opportunities for targeted data collection - Collaborate with engineering teams to integrate evaluation tooling, logging systems, and data pipelines into the broader robotics stack - Stay current with advances in robotics, evaluation methodologies, and human-in-the-loop learning to continuously improve internal approaches - Lead technical projects from conception through production deployment - Mentor junior scientists and engineers
Satellite GNC Engineer, Amazon Leo
US, WA, Redmond
Amazon Leo is building a constellation of thousands of low Earth orbit satellites to deliver fast, reliable internet beyond the reach of existing networks. As a Guidance, Navigation & Control engineer, you will design the algorithms, simulations, and onboard autonomy that keep every satellite precisely pointed and stable so the payload can serve customers below, and keep the fleet flying safely. This is satellite GNC with demanding pointing and performance requirements, and you will see your work go from concept to orbit on a constellation that is launching and growing today. Amazon Leo will delight customers with reliable connectivity regardless of where they are. In this role, you will: - Take your GNC algorithms from concept all the way to orbit, and stay close to them through integration, test, and on-orbit operations - Solve hard precise-pointing, payload-cueing, and fleet-autonomy problems against demanding performance requirements - Work across the full lifecycle — design, simulation, test, and flight operations — rather than a narrow slice - Join a small team of some of the top GNC engineers in the industry, building a product people will love to use This position is part of the Satellite Attitude Determination and Control team, where we own the full lifecycle of our work — from algorithm design and flight software, through lab integration, to flying our own satellites on orbit. You will design and analyze the control system and algorithms, support development of our flight hardware and software, help integrate the satellite in our labs, and operate the GNC system in flight as a constellation of satellites flows through the production line into orbit. **Export Control Requirement:** Due to applicable export control laws and regulations, candidates must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (i.e., current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum. Key job responsibilities - Design and analyze algorithms for state estimation, attitude determination and control, precise pointing, and payload cueing against demanding performance requirements. - Write the production C++ flight code that runs these algorithms on the satellite. Our GNC engineers own their algorithms all the way into flight software, working alongside software development engineers rather than handing prototypes off to be reimplemented by another team. - Design concepts of operation that balance pointing and payload cueing, momentum management, power, thermal, and communications across all phases of the mission, including off-nominal and contingency scenarios. - Develop momentum management strategies using reaction wheels and magnetic torquers, and help size and lay out the GNC sensor and actuator suite — star trackers, magnetometers, sun sensors, IMUs, and GPS receivers — and the algorithms that consume them. - Develop onboard autonomy, including Fault Detection, Isolation, and Recovery, so the fleet operates safely at scale with minimal intervention. - Develop and validate models and simulations of the satellite and constellation across a range of fidelity levels, including 6-DOF time-domain simulation and Monte Carlo analysis, and run hardware-in-the-loop testing to verify closed-loop performance. - Support component-level environmental testing, functional and performance checkout, and subsystem and satellite integration in our labs. - Analyze fleet telemetry in bulk and build the metrics, dashboards, and tooling that let us monitor and continuously improve pointing performance and payload operations time as the constellation grows. - Operate the GNC system on orbit — reviewing fleet data, supporting maneuvers, and resolving anomalies when on-orbit behavior diverges from the ground model. - Contribute to architecture, design, and code reviews, and document your algorithms, analyses, and results clearly. A day in the life This role spans a diverse set of problems across the spacecraft and network system. You will derive and prototype estimation and control algorithms, turn them into production flight code, and prove them out through 6-DOF and Monte Carlo simulation and hardware-in-the-loop testing in the lab. You will support satellite integration, and when something on orbit does not behave the way the ground model predicted, you will dig into fleet telemetry to find out why and drive the fix. You will own problems end to end and have the focus to go deep on each one. Because GNC sits at the center of safe flight, you will work across the whole program. The payload, power, thermal, and operations teams all depend on GNC, so you will balance their needs against your pointing and momentum budgets. To get your algorithms running reliably on the spacecraft, you will partner closely with avionics, flight software, and our embedded software development engineers. You will help the mechanical teams shape the next generation of satellite hardware, from reaction wheels to star trackers. And as satellites move from design through manufacturing into orbit, you will work alongside systems engineering and Assembly, Integration & Test. The problems are genuinely hard — demanding pointing and performance requirements, a large constellation to keep flying safely, and the chance to invent advanced capabilities that have not been built before. The work is staffed with some of the strongest engineers in the industry, and the constant collaboration across teams makes it a place to keep learning and growing. About the team Our team brings deep experience across many satellite systems and other flight vehicles, with real bench strength in both our mission and the core GNC disciplines. We design, prototype, test, iterate, and learn together, and because GNC is central to safe flight, we tend to drive Concepts of Operation and many of the system-level analyses on the program. We also have a lot of freedom. We trust our engineers to pursue the problems they face in whatever way they find best, to choose their own tools and approaches, and to own the results. If you want the autonomy to solve hard problems your way, and a team of strong engineers to do it with, you will feel at home here.
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