The Alexa Prize

Over $3.5 Million to Advance Conversational Artificial Intelligence

December 2017 - November 2018

It’s Day One for 2018 Alexa Prize Participants

Amazon announces the 2018 teams selected to compete for the Alexa Prize, a $3.5 million university challenge to advance human-computer interaction. These teams will create socialbots that can converse coherently and engagingly with humans on a range of current events and popular topics such as entertainment, sports, politics, technology, and fashion. Each university team participating in Alexa Prize 2018 will receive a $250,000 research grant, Alexa-enabled devices, free Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support their development efforts, and access to other tools, data, and Alexa team support.

Amazon received applications from leading universities from more than 15 countries. All applications were reviewed and evaluated based on the following criteria: the 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. Read the blog post on the team announcement.

Congratulations!

Meet the Sponsored Teams in the 2018 Alexa Prize Challenge

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.

Learn more about the results of the 2017 Alexa Prize.

Key Dates

  • February

    Competition begins

  • May

    First customer feedback period

  • July-August

    Semifinals

  • August - October

    Final customer feedback period

  • November

    Competition concludes & winners announced

Read the FAQs here.

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