A group of students at the University of Washington won a $500,000 prize after developing a "socialbot" that allowed judges to speak with Alexa, like she was a human, for more than 10 minutes!
What's involved in developing a socialbot like this?
Not much, really.
Just: dialogue management, natural language understanding (NLU), contextual modeling, commonsense reasoning, and response generation.
The end result is what you see in this story from Seattle's KOMO-TV:
The average conversation time for the Alexa socialbot developed by the University of Washington students was 10 minutes and 22 seconds.
They did better than any other college team in the world.
Amazon's top prize of $1 million is still up for grabs, but you'll need to develop a socialbot that allows Alexa to chat with you, in a human-like way, for 20 minutes.
Here is where you can enter Amazon's Alexa contest after December 4, 2017, and before January 8, 2018.
If you learned about the contest from SecureWorld, please remember to give us a shout out if you win.
Or at least mention us to Alexa, if you don't mind.
