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.

Through the innovative work of students, Amazon Alexa customers will have novel, engaging interactions. And, the immediate feedback from these customers will help students improve their algorithms much faster than previously possible.
  • The grand challenge is focused on creating a SocialBot, an Alexa skill that converses coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics and news.
  • The challenge is focused on helping advance development of next-gen virtual assistants that will assist humans in completing real-world tasks by continuously learning, and gaining the ability to perform commonsense reasoning.
  • The challenge is focused on developing agents that assist customers in completing complex tasks that require multiple steps and decisions. It's the first conversational AI challenge to incorporate multimodal (voice and vision) customer experiences.

Resources

  • View the competing Alexa Prize teams from universities around the world, and learn more about the students, team leaders, and faculty advisors.
  • Businessman hands searching data information in Stack of papers files on work desk in office, business report paper or piles of unfinished documents achives with clips on offices indoor, Business concept
    SMOLAW/smolaw11 - stock.adobe.com
    See the research in conversational AI resulting from the pursuit of the Alexa Prize competition goals.
  • FAQ, ask quiestion online, what where when how and why, search information on internet
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    Before getting in touch, check and see if we've covered your query in our frequently asked questions.
  • Teams build their bots using the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), which enables them to receive continuous feedback on their inventions in real-world settings.

Up next

Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge Finals On now
Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge Finals
Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 4 On now
Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 4
How to create a compelling Alexa Prize application On now
How to create a compelling Alexa Prize application
Panelists discuss the Alexa Prize during WSDM 2021 On now
Panelists discuss the Alexa Prize during WSDM 2021
Welcome to the Alexa Prize On now
Welcome to the Alexa Prize
Winners of the Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 3 discuss their research On now
Winners of the Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 3 discuss their research
Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 3 On now
Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 3
Understanding conversational AI with Professor Oliver Lemon On now
Understanding conversational AI with Professor Oliver Lemon
Team Gunrock, UC Davis, discuss the Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 3 On now
Team Gunrock, UC Davis, discuss the Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 3
Yoelle Maarek, Alexa Shopping vice president of research and science On now
Yoelle Maarek, Alexa Shopping vice president of research and science
Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Alexa AI senior principal scientist On now
Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Alexa AI senior principal scientist
Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 2 On now
Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 2
Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 1 On now
Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 1
Introducing the Alexa Prize On now
Introducing the Alexa Prize
Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge Finals
Jeff Bezos Amazon Science Shareholder Letter.jpg
I believe the dreamers come first, and the builders come second. A lot of the dreamers are science fiction authors, they’re artists...They invent these ideas, and they get catalogued as impossible. And we find out later, well, maybe it’s not impossible. Things that seem impossible if we work them the right way for long enough, sometimes for multiple generations, they become possible.
Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon

Latest news

The latest updates, stories, and more about Alexa Prize.
US, CA, San Francisco
The Generative AI Innovation Center at AWS helps AWS customers accelerate the use of Generative AI and realize transformational business opportunities. This is a cross-functional team of ML scientists, engineers, architects, and strategists working step-by-step with customers to build bespoke solutions that harness the power of Generative AI. As an Applied Scientist, you are proficient in designing and developing advanced ML models to solve diverse challenges and opportunities. You will work directly with customers and innovate in a fast-paced organization that contributes to game-changing projects and technologies. You will design and run experiments, research new algorithms, and find new ways of optimizing risk, profitability, and customer experience. We’re looking for ML Applied Scientists capable of using GenAI and other ML/DL techniques to design, evangelize, and implement state-of-the-art solutions for never-before-solved problems. Sales, Marketing, and Global Services (SMGS) is responsible for driving revenue, adoption, and growth from the largest and fastest growing small- and mid-market accounts to enterprise-level customers including public sector. The AWS Global Support team interacts with leading companies and believes that world-class support is critical to customer success. AWS Support also partners with a global list of customers that are building mission-critical applications on top of AWS services. Key job responsibilities As an ML Applied Scientist, you will: - Collaborate with ML scientist and architects to research, design, develop, and evaluate cutting-edge generative AI algorithms to address real-world challenges across industries - Interact with customers directly to understand the business problem, and help them in defining and implementing generative AI solutions and guide customers on adoption patterns and paths to production - Work closely with account teams, research scientist teams, and product engineering teams to drive model implementations and new solution - Create and deliver best practice recommendations, scientific artifacts, tutorials, blog posts, sample code, and presentations adapted to technical, business, and executive stakeholders A day in the life About AWS Diverse Experiences AWS values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying. Why AWS? Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. We pioneered cloud computing and never stopped innovating — that’s why customers from the most successful startups to Global 500 companies trust our robust suite of products and services to power their businesses. Inclusive Team Culture Here at AWS, it’s in our nature to learn and be curious. Our employee-led affinity groups foster a culture of inclusion that empower us to be proud of our differences. Ongoing events and learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon (gender diversity) conferences, inspire us to never stop embracing our uniqueness. Mentorship & Career Growth We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional. Work/Life Balance We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why flexible work hours and arrangements are part of our culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve in the cloud About the team The team helps customers imagine and scope the use cases that will create the greatest value for their businesses, select and fine-tune the right models, define paths to navigate technical or business challenges, develop proof-of-concepts, and make plans for launching solutions at scale. The GenAI Innovation Center team provides guidance on best practices for applying generative AI responsibly and cost efficiently.
US, WA, Seattle
Are you fascinated by the power of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Models (LLM) to transform the way we interact with technology? Are you passionate about the use of Generative AI to build an advertiser facing solution that predict problems and coach users while they solve real word problems? If so, Amazon's Support Product & Services (SP&S) team has an exciting opportunity for you as an Applied Scientist. Key job responsibilities • Apply your expertise in LLM models to design, develop, and implement scalable machine learning solutions that address complex language-related challenges in the advertising support center domain. • Use Transformers and apply other NLP techniques like Sentence embeddings, Dimensionality reduction, clustering and topic modeling to identify customer intents and utterances. • Use services like AWS Lex, AWS Bedrock etc. to develop advertising facing solutions • Work closely with teams of scientists and software engineers to drive real-time model implementations and deliver novel and highly impactful solutions. • Automating feedback loops for algorithms in production. • Setup and monitor alarms to detect anomalous data patterns and perform root cause analyses to explain and address them. • Be a member of the Amazon-wide Machine Learning Community, participating in internal and external MeetUps, Hackathons and Conferences. A day in the life You will work closely with a cross functional team of Software Engineers, Product Owners, Data Scientists, and Contact Center experts. You will research and investigate the latest options in industry to apply machine learning and generative AI to real world problems. You will work backwards from customer problems and collaborate with stakeholders to determine how to scale new technology and integrate with complicated help channels used by advertisers everyday. About the team SP&S team provides solutions and libraries that are leveraged by teams all across Amazon Advertising to provide timely and personalized help. The team aims to predict Advertisers problems and proactively surface intelligent guidance to customers at the right time. As a AS, you will help the team to achieve its vision of building and implementing the next generation of Contact Center technology. You will build/leverage LLMs to train them on advertising support domain knowledge and work shoulder to shoulder with stakeholders to externalize to users in novel ways.
LU, Luxembourg
Have you ever ordered a product on Amazon and when that box with the smile arrived you wondered how it got to you so fast? Have you wondered where it came from and how much it cost Amazon to deliver it to you? We are looking for a Senior Data Scientist who will be responsible to develop cutting-edge scientific solutions to optimize our Pan-European fulfillment strategy, to maximize our Customer Experience and minimize our cost and carbon footprint. You will partner with the worldwide scientific community to help design the optimal fulfillment strategy for Amazon. You will also collaborate with technical teams to develop optimization tools for network flow planning and execution systems. Finally, you will also work with business and operational stakeholders to influence their strategy and gather inputs to solve problems. To be successful in the role, you will need deep analytical skills and a strong scientific background. The role also requires excellent communication skills, and an ability to influence across business functions at different levels. You will work in a fast-paced environment that requires you to be detail-oriented and comfortable in working with technical, business and technical teams. Key job responsibilities - Design and develop mathematical models to optimize inventory placement and product flows. - Design and develop statistical and optimization models for planning Supply Chain under uncertainty. - Manage several, high impact projects simultaneously. - Consult and collaborate with business and technical stakeholders across multiple teams to define new opportunities to optimize our Supply Chain. - Communicate data-driven insights and recommendations to diverse senior stakeholders through technical and/or business papers.
US, NJ, Newark
Good storytelling starts with great listening. At Audible, that means each role and every project has our audience in mind. Because the same people who design, develop, and deploy our products also happen to use them. To us, that speaks volumes. ABOUT THIS ROLE As Senior Data Scientist, you will build scalable solutions and models to support our business functions (Marketing, Product, Content). Leveraging a range of methods including machine learning and simulation, you will explain, quantify, predict and prescribe in support of informing critical business decisions. You will translate business goals into agile, insightful analytics. You will seek to create value for both stakeholders and customers and inform findings in a clear, actionable way to managers and senior leaders. ABOUT THE TEAM Audible data science team partners with marketing, content, product, and technology teams to solve business and technology problems using scientific approaches to build product and services that surprise and delight our customers. We employ scalable cutting-edge machine learning (ML), causal inference (CI) and GenAI / Natural Language Processing (NLP) knowledge to better target customers and prospects, understand and personalize the content, and context needed to optimize their book-listening experience. We operate in an agile environment in which we own and collaborate on the life cycle of research, design, and model development of relevant projects. ABOUT YOU We are looking for a motivated, results-oriented Data Scientist with strong rigor and demonstrable skills in ML, CI, NLP, data mining and/or large-scale distributed computation. As a Senior Data Scientist, you will... - Develop and validate models to optimize the Who, When, Where and How of all our interactions with customers - Develop Amazon-scale data engineering pipelines - Imagine and invent before the business asks, and create groundbreaking applications using cutting-edge approaches - Develop compelling data visualizations - Work closely with other data scientists, ML experts, engineers as well as business across globe, and on cross-disciplinary efforts with other scientists within Amazon - Contribute to the growth of the Audible Data Science team by sharing your ideas, intellectual property and learning from others ABOUT AUDIBLE Audible is the leading producer and provider of audio storytelling. We spark listeners’ imaginations, offering immersive, cinematic experiences full of inspiration and insight to enrich our customers daily lives. Our Hub+Home hybrid workplace model gives employees the flexibility between gathering in a common office space (work from hub) and remote work (work from home). For more information, please visit adbl.co/hybrid
IN, HR, Gurugram
Our customers have immense faith in our ability to deliver packages timely and as expected. A well planned network seamlessly scales to handle millions of package movements a day. It has monitoring mechanisms that detect failures before they even happen (such as predicting network congestion, operations breakdown), and perform proactive corrective actions. When failures do happen, it has inbuilt redundancies to mitigate impact (such as determine other routes or service providers that can handle the extra load), and avoids relying on single points of failure (service provider, node, or arc). Finally, it is cost optimal, so that customers can be passed the benefit from an efficiently set up network. Amazon Shipping is hiring Applied Scientists to help improve our ability to plan and execute package movements. As an Applied Scientist in Amazon Shipping, you will work on multiple challenging machine learning problems spread across a wide spectrum of business problems. You will build ML models to help our transportation cost auditing platforms effectively audit off-manifest (discrepancies between planned and actual shipping cost). You will build models to improve the quality of financial and planning data by accurately predicting ship cost at a package level. Your models will help forecast the packages required to be pick from shipper warehouses to reduce First Mile shipping cost. Using signals from within the transportation network (such as network load, and velocity of movements derived from package scan events) and outside (such as weather signals), you will build models that predict delivery delay for every package. These models will help improve buyer experience by triggering early corrective actions, and generating proactive customer notifications. Your role will require you to demonstrate Think Big and Invent and Simplify, by refining and translating Transportation domain-related business problems into one or more Machine Learning problems. You will use techniques from a wide array of machine learning paradigms, such as supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised and reinforcement learning. Your model choices will include, but not be limited to, linear/logistic models, tree based models, deep learning models, ensemble models, and Q-learning models. You will use techniques such as LIME and SHAP to make your models interpretable for your customers. You will employ a family of reusable modelling solutions to ensure that your ML solution scales across multiple regions (such as North America, Europe, Asia) and package movement types (such as small parcel movements and truck movements). You will partner with Applied Scientists and Research Scientists from other teams in US and India working on related business domains. Your models are expected to be of production quality, and will be directly used in production services. You will work as part of a diverse data science and engineering team comprising of other Applied Scientists, Software Development Engineers and Business Intelligence Engineers. You will participate in the Amazon ML community by authoring scientific papers and submitting them to Machine Learning conferences. You will mentor Applied Scientists and Software Development Engineers having a strong interest in ML. You will also be called upon to provide ML consultation outside your team for other problem statements. If you are excited by this charter, come join us!
US, WA, Seattle
Amazon Advertising is one of Amazon's fastest growing and most profitable businesses. Amazon's advertising portfolio helps merchants, retail vendors, and brand owners succeed via native advertising, which grows incremental sales of their products sold through Amazon. The primary goals are to help shoppers discover new products they love, be the most efficient way for advertisers to meet their business objectives, and build a sustainable business that continuously innovates on behalf of customers. Our products and solutions are strategically important to enable our Retail and Marketplace businesses to drive long-term growth. We deliver billions of ad impressions and millions of clicks and break fresh ground in product and technical innovations every day! As an Applied Scientist on this team, you will: - Be a strong contributor to Machine Learning; lending effort within this team and across other teams. - Perform hands-on analysis and modeling of enormous data sets to develop insights that increase traffic monetization and merchandise sales, without compromising the shopper experience. - Drive end-to-end Machine Learning projects that have a high degree of ambiguity, scale, complexity. - Build machine learning models, perform proof-of-concept, experiment, optimize, and deploy your models into production; work closely with software engineers to assist in productionizing your ML models. - Run A/B experiments, gather data, and perform statistical analysis. - Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large-scale data analysis, machine-learning model development, model validation and serving. - Research new and innovative machine learning approaches. Why you will love this opportunity: Amazon is investing heavily in building a world-class advertising business. This team defines and delivers a collection of advertising products that drive discovery and sales. Our solutions generate billions in revenue and drive long-term growth for Amazon’s Retail and Marketplace businesses. We deliver billions of ad impressions, millions of clicks daily, and break fresh ground to create world-class products. We are a highly motivated, collaborative, and fun-loving team with an entrepreneurial spirit - with a broad mandate to experiment and innovate. Impact and Career Growth: You will invent new experiences and influence customer-facing shopping experiences to help suppliers grow their retail business and the auction dynamics that leverage native advertising; this is your opportunity to work within the fastest-growing businesses across all of Amazon! Define a long-term science vision for our advertising business, driven from our customers' needs, translating that direction into specific plans for research and applied scientists, as well as engineering and product teams. This role combines science leadership, organizational ability, technical strength, product focus, and business understanding. Team video https://youtu.be/zD_6Lzw8raE
US, WA, Bellevue
The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Senior Applied Scientist with a strong deep learning background, to help build industry-leading technology with Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal systems. Key job responsibilities As a Senior Applied Scientist with the AGI team, you will work with talented peers to develop novel algorithms and modeling techniques to advance the state of the art with LLMs. Your work will directly impact our customers in the form of products and services that make use of audio technology. You will leverage Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in AGI in audio domain. About the team Our team has a mission to push the envelope of AGI in audio domain, in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers.
US, WA, Bellevue
Amazon SCOT OIH (Supply Chain Optimization Technology - Optimal Inventory Health) team owns inventory health management for Retail worldwide. We use a dynamic programming model to maximize the net present value of inventory driving actions such as pricing markdowns, deals, removals, coupons etc. Our team, the OIH Insights Team energize and empower OIH business with the clarity and conviction required to make impactful business decisions through the generation of actionable and explainable insights, we do so through the following mechanisms: -- Transforming raw, complex datasets into intuitive, and actionable insights that impact OIH strategy and accelerate business decision making. -- Building and maintaining modular, scalable data models that provide the generality, flexibility, intuitiveness, and responsiveness required for seamless self-service insights. -- Generating deeper insights that drive competitive advantage using statistical modeling and machine learning. As a data scientist in the team, you can contribute to each layers of a data solution – you work closely with business intelligence engineers and product managers to obtain relevant datasets and prototype predictive analytic models, you team up with data engineers and software development engineers to implement data pipeline to productionize your models, and review key results with business leaders and stakeholders. Your work exhibits a balance between scientific validity and business practicality. You will be diving deep in our data and have a strong bias for action to quickly produce high quality data analyses with clear findings and recommendations. The ideal candidate is self-motivated, has experience in applying technical knowledge to a business context, can turn ambiguous business questions into clearly defined problems, can effectively collaborate with research scientists, software development engineers, and product managers, and deliver results that meet high standards of data quality, security, and privacy. Key job responsibilities 1. Define and conduct experiments to optimize Long Term Free Cash Flow for Amazon Retail inventory, and communicate insights and recommendations to product, engineering, and business teams 2. Interview stakeholders to gather business requirements and translate them into concrete requirement for data science projects 3. Build models that forecast growth and incorporate inputs from product, engineering, finance and marketing partners 4. Apply data science techniques to automatically identify trends, patterns, and frictions of product life cycle, seasonality, etc 5. Work with data engineers and software development engineers to deploy models and experiments to production 6. Identify and recommend opportunities to automate systems, tools, and processes
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Advertising at Amazon is a fast-growing multi-billion dollar business that spans across desktop, mobile and connected devices; encompasses ads on Amazon and a vast network of hundreds of thousands of third party publishers; and extends across US, EU and an increasing number of international geographies. One of the key focus areas is Traffic Quality where we endeavour to identify non-human and invalid traffic within programmatic ad sources, and weed them out to ensure a high quality advertising marketplace. We do this by building machine learning and optimization algorithms that operate at scale, and leverage nuanced features about user, context, and creative engagement to determine the validity of traffic. The challenge is to stay one step ahead by investing in deep analytics and developing new algorithms that address emergent attack vectors in a structured and scalable fashion. We are committed to building a long-term traffic quality solution that encompasses all Amazon advertising channels and provides state-of-the-art traffic filtering that preserves advertiser trust and saves them hundreds of millions of dollars of wasted spend. We are looking for talented applied scientists who enjoy working on creative machine learning algorithms and thrive in a fast-paced, fun environment. An Applied Scientist is responsible for solving inherently hard problems in advertising fraud detection using deep learning, self-supervised techniques, representation learning and advanced clustering. An ideal candidate should have strong depth and breadth knowledge in machine learning, data mining and statistics. Traffic quality systems process billions of ad-impressions and clicks per day, by leveraging cutting-edge open source technologies like Hadoop, Spark, Redis and Amazon's cloud services like EC2, S3, EMR, DynamoDB and RedShift. The candidate should have reasonable programming and design skills to manipulate unstructured and big data and build prototypes that work on massive datasets. The candidate should be able to apply business knowledge to perform broad data analysis as a precursor to modeling and to provide valuable business intelligence.
IN, TS, Hyderabad
Customer addresses, Geospatial information and Road-network play a crucial role in Amazon Logistics' Delivery Planning systems. We own exciting science problems in the areas of Address Normalization, Geocode learning, Maps learning, Time estimations including route-time, delivery-time, transit-time predictions which are key inputs in delivery planning. As part of the Geospatial science team within Last Mile, you will partner closely with other scientists and engineers in a collegial environment to develop enterprise ML solutions with a clear path to business impact. The setting also gives you an opportunity to think about a complex large-scale problem for multiple years and building increasingly sophisticated solutions year over year. In the process there will be opportunity to innovate, explore SOTA and publish the research in internal and external ML conferences. Successful candidates will have deep knowledge of competing machine learning methods for large scale predictive modelling, natural language processing, semi-supervised & graph based learning. We also look for the experience to graduate prototype models to production and the communication skills to explain complex technical approaches to the stakeholders of varied technical expertise. Here is a glimpse of the problem spaces and technologies that we deal with on a regular basis: 1. De-duping and organizing addresses into hierarchy while handling noisy, inconsistent, localized and multi-lingual user inputs. We do this at the scale of millions of customers for established (US, EU) as well as emerging geographies (IN, MX). We make use of technologies like LLMs, Weak supervision, Graph-based clustering & Entity matching. We also use additional modalities such as building outlines in maps, street view images and 3P datasets, gazetteers. 2. Build a generic ML framework which leverages relationship between places to improve delivery experience by learning precise delivery locations and propagating attributes, such as business hours and safe places. This requires us to combine a variety of inputs (maps, delivery locations, defects) effectively, work in a multi-objective setting and exploit semantic as well as structural properties of places. 3. Build LLMs and Foundational models that are specialized for Geospatial domain to perform multitasking (address parsing, validation, normalization, completion, etc.). We also use in-context and retrieval augmented learning to utilize real-world contextual information to ground the model predictions. 4. (Work done in sister teams) Developing systems to consume inputs from areal imagery and optimize our maps to enable efficient delivery planning. Also building models to estimate travel time, turn costs, optimal route and defect propensities. For these problems, we make use of multiple CV, Optimization (TSP), Counterfactual analysis and other supervised learning techniques that can operate at scale. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist II, your responsibility will be to deliver on a well defined but complex business problem, explore SOTA technologies including GenAI and customize the large models as suitable for the application. Your job will be to work on a end-to-end business problem from design to experimentation and implementation. There is also an opportunity to work on open ended ML directions within the space and publish the work in prestigious ML conferences. About the team Last Mile Address Intelligence (LMAI) team is led by Saurabh Sohoney and is spread across HYD13 and BLR26 locations. LMAI team owns WW charter for address and location learning solutions which are crucial for efficient Last Mile delivery planning. LMAI is a part of Geospatial science team led by Amber Roy Chowdhury, who also owns problems in the space of maps learning and travel time estimations. His rest of the team and senior leadership of Last Mile org works out of Bellevue office.