With the inaugural Alexa Prize in the history books, it’s time to focus on 2018! Since the winning student team in this year’s competition was unable to meet our Grand Challenge of maintaining a coherent and engaging conversation for 20 minutes, we are continuing the Alexa Prize competition in 2018.

Applications from university teams opened on December 4, 2017, and close on January 8, 2018. Click here to learn more. Start building your team and apply today!

There are a number of noteworthy features that distinguish the Alexa Prize from other challenges:

1. University students will receive feedback on their algorithms and interactions from millions of engaged users of a real-world AI technology. In 2017, Alexa customers had over 40,000 hours of conversations with Alexa Prize socialbots, spanning millions of interactions. Learn more about how the challenge works here.
2. All eight teams chosen for the 2018 Alexa Prize challenge will also receive a sponsorship of $250,000 to build their conversational bots. Funding includes support for two full-time students and one month of faculty time.
3. Participating teams will receive training, support, and access to the full suite of AWS services at no cost.
4. The competing teams will own what they create for the competition, and will grant Amazon a non-exclusive license to those works. Please carefully review the Official Rules for details on IP ownership.

We look forward to receiving applications from your students and others from your university. Contact our team with questions or for additional information.