What is the Alexa Prize?
The Alexa Prize is a series of competitions for university students dedicated to accelerating the field of artificial intelligence. Participating teams will advance several areas of AI through generalizable methodologies such as continuous learning, teachable AI, multimodal understanding, and reasoning.
What is the socialbot challenge?
It's the first conversational AI challenge to incorporate multimodal (voice and vision) customer experiences. The grand challenge is focused on creating a SocialBot, an Alexa skill that converses coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics and news events for 20-minutes, while achieving an average rating of at least 4.0/5.0.
What can we learn from the Amazon Alexa project?
Participating teams will advance several areas of AI through generalizable methodologies such as continuous learning, teachable AI, multimodal understanding, and reasoning. Through the innovative work of students, Amazon Alexa customers will have novel, engaging interactions.
What is Alexa SocialBot?
SocialBot Grand Challenge. The grand challenge is focused on creating a SocialBot, an Alexa skill that converses coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics and news events for 20-minutes, while achieving an average rating of at least 4.0/5.0.
What is the prize of Alexa?
The Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge brings teams from across the world together to compete in developing an interactive socialbot, with the first-place winner receiving a research grant of $500,000.
What is Alexa prize Taskbot?
The challenge is focused on developing agents that assist customers in completing tasks requiring multiple steps and decisions. It's the first conversational AI challenge to incorporate multimodal (voice and vision) customer experiences.
What type of bot is Alexa?
chatbotAlexa is formally a chatbot. Recently, Amazon started revealing another component on iOS that empowers clients to type their solicitations to Alexa and see reactions on the screen.
Who is the voice of Alexa?
Nina Rolle is most likely behind Alexa According to Wired, Stone's research for his book, "Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire," pointed to Boulder, Colorado, voice actress Nina Rolle.
Why is Alexa named Alexa?
'They just appropriated our name' Amazon chose the name Alexa because it “was inspired by the Library of Alexandria and is reflective of Alexa's depth of knowledge,” Lauren Raemhild, a public relations specialist for Amazon, said in a statement, referring to the late-pharaonic-era institution in Egypt.
What's best Alexa or Google?
The Best Smart Speaker for You Both voice assistants are neck and neck, though we give Google Assistant a slight edge thanks to its better natural language recognition. It doesn't have the number of third-party skills Alexa does, but it's still robust, and easier to talk to.
How do Alexas work?
How does Alexa work? Unlike a normal computer program, Alexa works using voice control. That means you have to say questions or commands out loud, and she'll respond through your Alexa speaker. Every Alexa speaker comes equipped with far-field microphones, so she should be able to hear you from anywhere in the room.
What are Alexa features?
Alexa featuresSmart home. Productivity.Shopping. Entertainment.Alexa Together. Communications.News. Routines.Fun and games. Multi-room audio.
Is Siri a bot?
Yes! Technologies like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant that are ubiquitous in every household today are excellent examples of conversational AI. These conversational AI bots are more advanced than regular chatbots that are programmed with answers to certain questions.
How do I talk to Alexa?
Android and iOS users can chat with their favorite voice assistant directly through the Alexa app or a third-party app called Listens for Alexa. You can easily chat with Alexa through your Amazon Echo.
How do I activate Alexa?
Tip: Before setup, download or update the Alexa app in your mobile device app store.Plug in your device.Open the Alexa app .Open More and select Add Device.Select Amazon Echo.Select Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Plus and more. Follow the instructions to set up your device.
Do you pay for Alexa monthly?
A: There is no monthly fee to operate Alexa on Amazon Alexa-enabled devices. There are subscription services that you can buy which have monthly fees, such as Amazon Prime Services.
What's best Alexa or Google?
The Best Smart Speaker for You Both voice assistants are neck and neck, though we give Google Assistant a slight edge thanks to its better natural language recognition. It doesn't have the number of third-party skills Alexa does, but it's still robust, and easier to talk to.
Can Alexa call 911?
But will Alexa dial 911 for you in an emergency? You can't ask Alexa to dial 911 or other emergency services directly, unless you have an Echo Connect hooked up to a landline phone. You can, however, set up a personal emergency contact, and turn on Alexa Guard for home security.
Does Alexa need WiFi?
Alexa devices need a WiFi connection to function properly. When you ask Alexa a question or use a voice command, an audio recording is sent to Amazon's cloud over your WiFi network. Then it is processed and sent back to your device over WiFi so Alexa can answer your question or fulfill your request.
Q. What does this achievement mean for the team and, more broadly, Czech Technical University?
It’s a confirmation that the team and our research are going in the right direction and the AI is ready to use in real-world scenarios. It’s an amazing accomplishment for our team, which we hope opens many more opportunities.
Q. Was there a particular area of focus that vaulted you to the win in 2021?
The current version of the Alquist socialbot effectively combines a flexible generative approach and high-quality dialogue scenarios.
Q. What do you see as the biggest hurdle in meeting the Socialbot Grand Challenge?
It’s challenging to lead a long, meaningful conversation with a person you have only just met. You have little to no information about your conversation partner, which is crucial for an engaging dialogue.
Q. What advice would you give universities and students considering participating in the Socialbot Grand Challenge and more broadly in the field of conversational AI?
Our first and foremost piece of advice would definitely be to join the Socialbot Grand Challenge. It’s a fantastic opportunity to deliver your innovations to many users and see how they respond to and interact with your system.
How does Alexa bot competition work?
Once the bots are running and the competition begins, any Alexa user can connect to one of the bots , chosen randomly, by giving Alexa the prompt "Let's chat." After ending the conversation, users are prompted for feedback. The competition tracks several metrics about users' conversations with the bots; the most important is the 90th percentile duration. Other metrics include median duration and user rating on a scale of 1 to 5. Although this year's bots began the competition with better performance than last year's, quality began to decline during the Semifinal stage of the competition; Amazon attributes this to teams "experimenting with research ideas that are inherently unpredictable."
How long does Alexa need to interact with Alexa?
Teams from colleges and universities competing in the challenge must build Alexa skills that interact with random Alexa users, with the goal of engaging the user for at least 20 minutes and achieving a rating of 4 out of 5 from judges. Although no team achieved those goals, this year's winners, Team Alquist from Czech Technical University, had an average interaction duration of just over 14 minutes and an average rating of 3.28. According to the team leader Jakub Konrád:
What tools does Amazon use to build chatbots?
To build their chatbots, the teams use the Alexa Skills Kit and AWS Lambda to implement an Alexa Skill. Amazon also provides the teams with an additional Python toolkit called CoBot that includes natural language understanding, dialog management, and response generation services that use other AWS technologies for auto-scaling and high availability, allowing the teams to focus on the core conversational problem.
Why does Alexa need a chatbot?from voicebot.ai
Speaking is the most efficient and usually the most convenient way to invoke your voice assistant to get information or a task done. However, there are times when speaking is not optimal.
Why does Alexa suggest new items?from voicebot.ai
The obvious solution is to have Alexa suggest new items to try to raise awareness and drive the discovery of either first-party or third-party skills. However, if Alexa makes spoken suggestions too frequently it undermines user experience.
Can you talk to Alexa?from voicebot.ai
Alexa Becomes a Chatbot – You Can Now Talk to Alexa by Typing. Alexa is officially a chatbot. Yesterday, Amazon began rolling out a new feature on iOS that enables users to type their requests to Alexa and see responses on the screen. This is yet another update Amazon has made this year in its Alexa mobile app as the company attempts to extend ...
Can Alexa be used with other apps?from voicebot.ai
Granted, many things you do with Alexa can be done by other apps on your smartphone with a couple of taps and swipes. The question then will be whether going to Alexa or another app makes the most sense. Voice will remain the dominant interaction method but text-based communication has utility. Any voice assistant that wants to be used throughout the day and flexible enough to engage in different contexts needs this feature. Google Assistant has had it since rolling out on smartphones back in 2016-2017. In fact, Google actually made it a requirement for all Assistant Actions to support text interaction back in 2017.
Where is the keyboard icon on Alexa?from voicebot.ai
When you do want to use typing with Alexa, you can simply access it from the app home screen. A keyboard icon will appear in the upper left of the screen after you have used the feature once. This appears to only be available on iOS at the moment. My Android app update did not include an option to activate the chat typing feature.
Does Alexa have a timer?from voicebot.ai
Alexa starts off the conversation with a disclaimer that the feature is in preview. The timer feature works as you would expect . It even gives you a top-of-the-app banner notification when your timer is done in addition to the audible notification.
Is Alexa chatbot available without sound?from voicebot.ai
It will also be welcomed by many users as a big convenience since Alexa services will now be available without making a sound. Others will wonder why a chatbot is a necessary update. In July, the company overhauled the mobile app to make Alexa more prominent and encourage voice assistant access through smartphones.
What is Dream Socialbot?
DREAM Socialbot is a modular dialogue system implemented with the open-source DeepPavlov Agent framework. An overall structure of the original DREAM socialbot is shown in the image below.
What framework does Dream use?
T he DREAM team used the DeepPavlov Agent framework, while all other teams were building their socialbots on top of the private CoBot framework by Amazon. Generally, a lot of efforts were dedicated to DeepPavlov Agent adaptation, deployment, and analytical tools, basic content within retrieval and rule-based skills.
The approach
Sounding Board and each competing Alexa Prize team had access to Amazon’s automatic speech recognition service to get a textual interpretation of what a user said, and their text-to-speech technology to provide a response.
Spoken language understanding
The socialbot needed to understand what the user was saying in order to have a conversation, taking speech and extracting meaning out of it.
Hierarchical Dialog Manager
Once the system deciphers what a user is saying, it uses a “hierarchical dialog manager” that keeps the conversation coherent and keeps the user engaged. It’s a combination of a “master dialogue manager” in charge of switching between “miniskills” that dictate subsegments of the conversation.
Content manager
The socialbot needed to have a large collection of information covering various topics in order to carry out a conversation. Sounding Board built its content system using a knowledge graph that crawled the internet and extracted information from various sources, ranging from user-generated data on sites like Reddit, to more formal written articles.
Improvement
One key aspect of Sounding Board’s process that helped it win the Alexa Prize was how the team improved its socialbot over time. The students scoured through transcripts of interactions to find where conversations went poorly and figured out how to tweak the system to prevent future slipups.
What is Alexa Prize?from aboutamazon.com
Alexa Prize is a $3.5 million university challenge to advance conversational AI. The teams have developed and will continually improve their socialbots, based on customer feedback. The bots can engage in conversations on topics from entertainment and sports, to politics, technology and fashion. Amazon received applications for this year’s Challenge from leading universities from more than 15 countries. All applications were reviewed and evaluated based on their potential scientific contribution to the field, the technical merit of the approach, the novelty of the idea, and the team’s ability to execute against their plan.
How many teams are competing in the Alexa Prize Challenge?from aboutamazon.com
Representatives from the eight student teams competing in this year’s Alexa Prize Challenge gathered in Seattle this week for a Summit with many of Amazon’s conversational AI technical leaders and the official start of the customer feedback element of this year’s competition.
What universities are participating in the Socialbots program?from aboutamazon.com
This year’s participants include graduate student teams from Brigham Young University, Carnegie Mellon University, Czech Technical University, Emory University, Heriot-Watt University, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, University of California Davis and University of California Santa Cruz. They are focused on developing socialbots that can converse coherently and engagingly with humans for 20 minutes.
Who is the head scientist of Alexa?from aboutamazon.com
In a presentation to the students on Tuesday, Rohit Prasad, Alexa vice president and head scientist, encouraged the students to make some bold bets, take calculated risks and “work hard, have fun, and make history.” Prasad concluded his talk by quoting Walt Disney, “If you can dream it, you can do it.”
How much is the AWS reInvent prize?from aboutamazon.com
The 2018 winners will be announced in November 2018 during AWS re:Invent. A $500,000 prize will be awarded to the team selected for creating the best socialbot. The second- and third-place teams will receive prizes of $100,000 and $50,000, respectively. Additionally, a $1 million research grant will be awarded to the winning team’s university if their socialbot achieves the grand challenge of conversing coherently and engagingly with humans for 20 minutes with a 4.0 or higher rating.
