> developer.amazon.com/alexaprize

The Alexa Prize is an annual competition for university students dedicated to accelerating the field of conversational AI. The inaugural competition is focused on creating a socialbot, a new Alexa skill that converses coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics and news events. Participating teams will advance several areas of conversational AI including knowledge acquisition, natural language understanding, natural language generation, context modeling, commonsense reasoning and dialog planning. Through the innovative work of students, Alexa customers will have novel, engaging conversations. And, the immediate feedback from Alexa customers will help students improve their algorithms much faster than previously possible.

Pretty much everything I’ve worked on, so I am intrigued as to what people will come up with in the area of conversation.
However, only university students may enter so I needn’t feel tempted.

Amazon will award the winning team $500,000. Additionally, a prize of $1 million will be awarded to the winning team’s university if their socialbot achieves the grand challenge of conversing coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics for 20 minutes.

Interestingly, the people over at HackerNews consider this heavily underpaid, and they’re probably right, all things considered. The difference in prize money for essentially the same task as a Turing Test is also remarkable, but then again Turing Tests don’t require you to sign over all intellectual property rights.

Brillig Understanding’s ChatScript technology won best 15 minute conversation in ChatBotBattles 2012:
http://brilligunderstanding.com/conversation.html
and has won the Loebner Prize 4 times (fooling a judge back in 2010). It is the Natural Language technology underlying a number of tech companies, including Kore, YourMd, Botanic.io, and Hexagram.io.

Qualifying teams that want to use ChatScript to craft their bot will be given free advice and support from Brillig Understanding. This includes both technical support on ChatScript scripting as well as lessons in personality design and dialog writing.

That’s really interesting, Brillig Understanding ChatScript is behind:

- botanic.io (@botanic_io)
- hexagram.io (@hexagrammatical)
- kore.com (@kore)
- your.md (@yourdotmd)

Correction, marcus: http://hexagram.io/

Also, there are others, but I can’t release them.

Yes, of course; but, where’s the correction?

Sorry. Guess I didn’t recognize that they were the same.