E-commerce and cloud computing firm Amazon has launched a $2.5m competition called the Alexa Prize for university students developing artificial intelligence technology that will be compatible with its Alexa voice activation system.
Each team will be tasked with creating a ‘socialbot’ using Amazon’s Alexa Skills Kit that can chat with people about current events and general topics.
Amazon will sponsor up to 10 teams for the contest, providing a $100,000 stipend, support from the Alexa team, Alexa-enabled devices and free services from its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services.
The highest performing team will get a $500,000 first prize, and another $1m will go to a team’s university if their bot can communicate and engage with people for 20 minutes.