![]() “Normally people think of a chatbot as being an intelligent assistant, to answer questions or provide a customer service,” Fillwock says. Emory used a unique strategy to beat out nine other universities and take the top spot in this year’s competition, the most hotly contested ever. The annual Alexa Prize, launched in 2016, challenges university students to make breakthroughs in the design of chatbots, or social bots - software apps that simplify interactions between humans and computers by allowing them to talk with one another. “We are delighted that for the third year in a row, the winning team has set a new Alexa Prize record in terms of average ratings from users.” “Congratulations to the team from Emory for their impressive work in making conversations between humans and Alexa more engaging,” said Prem Natarajan, Amazon vice president of Alexa AI’s Natural Understanding organization. Even as they celebrate their win, the Emory team is looking ahead to how they can apply the concepts they developed to benefit everything from education to people suffering from depression and social isolation. They christened their chatbot Emora because it sounds like a feminine version of “Emory” and is similar to a Hebrew term for a sage skilled in eloquence. The Emory team consisted of 14 students in Emory’s Laney Graduate School and Emory College of Arts and Sciences, led by graduate student Sarah Fillwock and faculty advisor Jinho Choi, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science. The students designed Emora as a “social companion” to provide comfort and warmth to people interacting with Amazon’s voice-activated Alexa-enabled devices, whether they wanted to discuss movies, sports and their pets or their concerns for themselves and their families amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The team earned $500,000 for taking first place with their chatbot named Emora. Amazon also added Alexa capabilities to its iOS app, subtly encouraging Apple users to shop through the online retailer's app if and when they want to use Alexa.View videos of Emora in action on YouTube through Emory’s Natural Language Processing Laboratory.Ī team of Emory University students won Amazon’s 2020 Alexa Prize, a global competition to create the most engaging chatbot to advance the field of artificial intelligence. Amazon already offers Alexa-specific shopping deals for users who use voice commands to place orders. ![]() One of the examples Amazon writes about in its Lex information page details how a user could order a coffee drink using a chatbot text interaction, with the bot asking contextual questions like "What size?" and "Would you like that iced or hot?" E-commerce interactions will likely be huge for Lex going forward, as they have been for Alexa. This newfound freedom developers have to use Amazon Lex will likely open up new uses for Amazon's voice assistant technologyAmazon wants developers to integrate Alexa features into chatbots and eventually Alexa. Lex and Alexa position Amazon as an even bigger competitor to Apple's Siri, Google's Assistant, and Microsoft's Cortana. While Amazon has sold about 10 million Alexa-equipped Echo speakers, Apple and Google have the advantage of having their assistants in hundreds of millions of smartphones. While Amazon has allowed companies to build Alexa into their products for quite some time-it nearly took over the smart home section of this year's CES-Lex allows developers to quickly build chatbots that give the users the power to control their services with voice or text input. This essentially lets developers build new voice- or text-based chatbots into their existing apps, adding an interactive portion that wasn't available before. In "preview phase" since 2016, Amazon Lex is now rolling out to all developers and gives them the tool to build "conversational interfaces" using the speech- and text-recognition technology behind Alexa. According to a report from Reuters, Amazon is giving developers access to the same tools that make up the foundations of Alexa via a new platform called Amazon Lex. Amazon's Alexa has executed a surprise takeover of the smart home industry since the launch of the Echo a few years ago, but now the company is opening up Alexa's technology for other applications. ![]()
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