Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has launched an initiative which aims to encourage students to create intelligent bots for Amazon Alexa. The ultimate aim of the initiative is to find a bot that can hold an intelligent conversation with the user.
Amazon has given the competition the name ‘Alexa Price’ based on its digital assistant Alexa. The teams involved in the competition will be battling it out for a chance to win and $2.5 million has been set aside as the price pool. Amazon wants the teams to come up with bots that have the ability to seamlessly talk about sports and celebrity gossip. The team that will win the competition will receive $500,000 and $1 million will be awarded to their respective university if their bot can chat for in an engaging manner for 20 minutes.
“Conversing for 20 minutes is difficult for most humans and an extraordinarily ambitious challenge for bots that are learning to converse like us,” stated Professor Dan Jurafsky who teaches computer science at Stanford university.
The Amazon Alexa competition to provide the Alexa Skills Kit to competitors
Students that will participate in the Amazon Alexa competition will be provided with the Alexa Skills Kit. This is the same developer kit that is used by developers to create voice-controlled applications for the Alexa digital assistant. The teams will also be provided with digital content from sources such as The Washington Post which will provide news sources for Alexa.
Amazon to sponsor ten teams
Amazon claims that it will sponsor 10 teams and they will receive an allowance of $100,000. The teams will also receive support from the Alexa team. They will also be provided with free access to the AWS services.
“Students engaging in the challenge will advance several areas of conversational AI including knowledge acquisition, natural language understanding, natural language generation, context modeling, commonsense reasoning, and dialog planning,”revealed Amazon in a statement.
Amazon stocks closed the latest trading session at $837.31 marking a $8.26 or 1% improvement compared to the value of the stock in the previous close.