Cognitive Computing A research blog by Ashwin Ram, PhD

Earlier today, Rohit Prasad, vice president and head scientist, Alexa Machine Learning, and I had the pleasure of announcing the winner of the inaugural Alexa Prize competition for university students dedicated to accelerating the field of conversational artificial intelligence (AI).

Congratulations to team Sounding Board, an inspiring group of students from the University of Washington, whose socialbot earned an average score of 3.17 on a 5-point scale from our panel of independent judges and achieved an average conversation duration of 10:22. As the winner of our inaugural competition, team Sounding Board earned our $500,000 first-place prize, which will be shared among the students.

We also had the privilege of honoring and surprising our other finalists on stage. Our runner up was team Alquist from Czech Technical University in Prague. We presented them with a $100,000 prize for their efforts. We also awarded our third-place winner, team What’s Up Bot from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, with a $50,000 prize.

CHAT WITH THE WINNERS:

Just say “Alexa, let’s chat” to any Alexa-enabled device. (If you’re outside the U.S., set your Amazon Preferred Marketplace (PFM) to U.S. or use a U.S. based Amazon account.)

VIEW THE KEYNOTE:

youtu.be/HXtjdXjpJwI?t=32m18s

VIEW A SHORT FILM SHOWCASING THE WINNING SOCIALBOTS AND HOW THEY WERE SELECTED:

youtu.be/WTGuOg7GXYU

READ MORE:

developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/1a6a19d8-e45d-4b3b-981d-776a378ba625/university-of-washington-students-win-inaugural-alexa-prize