This past September, 10 university teams, from schools around the world, officially began their journey with the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 3. Teams spent part of their summer attending an intensive boot camp to learn what it means to be customer obsessed and how to integrate their ideas into the Alexa Prize infrastructure. Now ready to compete, teams have built an AI (called a socialbot), at scale, capable of conversing coherently and engagingly with humans for 20 minutes. Their socialbots should be able to discuss popular topics and news events such as entertainment, fashion, politics, sports, and technology.

Even as innovators create AI that can drive cars, play board games, and diagnose diseases, the seemingly intuitive task of everyday social conversation remains an elusive goal. Undaunted, the student teams have geared up to tackle the challenge. As they build their socialbots, they will encounter esoteric problems like context modeling and dialog planning as well as exoteric problems like user experience and conversational engagement. The Alexa Prize provides a unique opportunity for industry and academia to come together to address these challenges.

We invite you to join the students on their journey and help them along the way. You can interact with their socialbots simply by saying, “Alexa, let’s chat” on any Alexa-enabled device in the US-English marketplace. You will be connected to one of the 10 socialbots at random. Chat about your favorite topics, say “Stop” when you are done, and share your feedback.

It is still early days in this pioneering journey, and we know the teams will appreciate your help and patience as they learn, iterate, and build new interactive conversational experiences. The socialbots will improve quickly based on your use and feedback. We hope you’ll enjoy interacting with them.

The student teams are working hard, having fun, and well on their way to making history. We look forward to having you join the Alexa Prize community to support them along the way.

Follow the #AlexaPrize hashtag and bookmark our site for updates.

Kixi is a German-language video on demand app designed to offer educationally valuable content for children and families. We had a quick chat with the app's developers to understand why they chose to publish it on the Amazon Appstore.

本日、Amazon.FallbackIntentが日本、フランス、イタリア、スペインで使用可能となりました。

さらに、AMAZON.PhoneNumber（ベータ）とAMAZON.Ordinal（ベータ）のビルトインスロットタイプも合わせて使用可能となりました。

We sat down with eOne to hear more about what drives their kids and family success on Amazon Fire tablets, their strategic vision toward offering versatile and rich content, and what app monetisation model they experienced resonates best with Amazon Appstore customers. 

So, you’ve published a skill to the Alexa Skills Store and now customers are using it. What’s next? With the metrics dashboard, you can measure how customers are interacting with your skill so you can continue improving their experience over time.

Teach Your Monster to Read is a suite of online literacy games designed to help children tackle their first steps of reading. We sat down with the game's developers to learn more about the game and understand why it was so important to them to publish it on the Amazon Appstore.

We are delighted to announce that in-skill purchasing (ISP) is now generally available for Alexa skills published in France, Italy and Spain. 

The Alexa Web API for Games (Preview) introduces web technologies and tools to create visually rich and interactive voice-controlled game experiences.

Alexa Web API for Games（プレビュー版）は、視覚的にリッチで、音声でインタラクティブに制御できるゲームを作成するためのウェブ技術とツールを導入します。Alexa Web API for Games を使うと、HTMLやCanvas 2D、WebAudio、WebGL、JavaScript、CSSなどのウェブ技術を使用してマルチモーダルデバイス向けにスキルを開発できます。

We’re excited to introduce a new Alexa Skills training course called How to Build a Multimodal Alexa Skill. This self-paced course is free and available to anyone ready to build skills using Alexa Presentation Language (APL).