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Hakkani-Tür discusses the third Alexa Prize Grand Challenge, in advance of the announcement of the winning teams this August.
Conversational AI

Alexa & Friends features Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Alexa AI senior principal scientist

Watch the replay of the live interview with Alexa evangelist Jeff Blankenburg.

By Staff writer
July 07, 2020
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The Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge is a competition for university students dedicated to accelerating the field of conversational AI. The competition is focused on university teams creating socialbots that can converse coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics and news events.

Since 2017, the Alexa Prize has engaged university teams in more than 15 different countries to tackle long-term research challenges in knowledge acquisition, natural language understanding, natural language generation, context modeling, commonsense reasoning and dialogue planning.

On July 23, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Alexa AI senior principal scientist, joined Jeff Blankenburg on Alexa & Friends to discuss the third Alexa Prize Grand Challenge, in advance of the announcement of the winning teams this August.

Watch the replay below, where Jeff and Dilek discuss how teams in this year’s Grand Challenge are faring in getting their socialbots to converse coherently and engagingly for 20 minutes with humans on a range of current events; the value of having university research teams help advance the current state of conversational AI technologies; the challenge of creating conversational socialbots versus today’s more task-oriented conversational assistants; and the future of conversational AI.

Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Alexa AI senior principal scientist
Hakkani-Tür discusses the third Alexa Prize Grand Challenge, in advance of the announcement of the winning teams this August.

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