On September 29, 2016, Amazon announced the Alexa Prize, a $2.5 million university competition to advance conversational AI through voice. We received applications from leading universities across 22 countries. Each application was carefully reviewed by senior Amazon personnel against a rigorous set of criteria covering scientific contribution, technical merit, novelty, and ability to execute. Teams of scientists, engineers, user experience designers, and product managers read, evaluated, discussed, argued, and finally selected the ten teams who would be invited to participate in the competition. Wait, make that twelve; we received so many good applications from graduate and undergraduate students that we decided to sponsor two additional teams.

Today, we’re excited to announce the 12 teams selected to compete with an Amazon sponsorship. In alphabetical order, they are:

• Carnegie-Mellon University: CMU Magnus
• Carnegie-Mellon University: TBD
• Czech Technical University, Prague: eClub Prague
• Heriot-Watt University, UK: WattSocialBot
• Princeton University: Princeton Alexa
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: BAKAbot
• University of California, Berkeley: Machine Learning @ Berkeley
• University of California, Santa Cruz: SlugBots
• University of Edinburgh, UK: Edina
• University of Montreal, Canada: MILA Team
• University of Trento, Italy: Roving Minds
• University of Washington, Seattle: HuskyBot

These teams will each receive a $100,000 research grant as a stipend, Alexa-enabled devices, free Amazon Web Services (AWS) services to support their development efforts, access to new Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) APIs, and support from the Alexa team. Teams invited to participate without sponsorship will be announced on December 12, 2016.