What is Amazon Alexa Prize?

Alexa, Let's Chat.... The Amazon Alexa Prize is an international competition that grants university students the opportunity to improve conversational artificial intelligence. We are trying to create a socialbot that can carry a lasting conversation for about 20 minutes. As the competition progresses, Alexa customers will then get the chance speak with each socialbot to test the effectiveness and success of each system.

Where Are We Now?

​We are currently competing in the 2019 Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 3  and are excited to see what the next competition will bring. We are looking forward to once again take part in the journey towards improving the quality of conversational AI.

Gunrock in the News

• Amazon awards Alexa Prize for conversational bots to Gunrock team from UC Davis 
• Announcing the 2018 Alexa Prize Winner 
• ‘Alexa, who won the $500,000 artificial intelligence prize?’ UC Davis team’s chatbot is champ
• ​Student Team Wins Amazon Alexa Artificial Intelligence Challenge
• "Alexa, Tell Me More..."
• UC Davis Wins Amazon Alexa AI Competition ​​

​Papers​

• Gunrock: A Social Bot for Complex and Engaging Long Conversations (Yu et al., 2019)​
• A Large-Scale User Study of an Alexa Prize Chatbot: Effect of TTS Dynamism on Perceived Quality of Social Dialog (Cohn, Chen, & Yu, 2019)​​
• Gunrock: Building A Human-Like Social Bot By Leveraging Large Scale Real User Data (Chen et al., 2019)​