Amazon Alexa Prize:
Socialbot Grand Challenge 3
Socialbot Grand Challenge 3
With a new team and a new competition, our team will compete once again against 9 other teams worldwide to improve the quality of conversational AI
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With a new team and a new competition, our team will compete once again against 9 other teams worldwide to improve the quality of conversational AI
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Introducing the Quarterfinals Interaction Period |
February 2020 |
Initial Feedback Period Recap |
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January 2020 |
Last month, we worked diligently through the Initial Feedback Period to make improvements on our social bot. In an effort to integrate user efforts during this phase of the competition, our team hosted an Open House on Thursday, January 23 to give UC Davis students the first opportunity to converse with our social bot. Students were able to talk about movies, sports, and music, and even learned about Gunrock’s favorite topics. Throughout this event, team members were able to monitor each conversation to find weak points of information feedback and errors in our bot’s responses. The interactions revealed new challenges such as getting Gunrock to maintain a conversation on a topic of the user’s interest, and making the transition of topic switching more subtle.
As previous winners of the 2018 Alexa Prize competition, we hope to take our developments a step further to stay competitive in this year’s event. We have made several improvements this year to improve the flow of conversation to keep the user engaged. For example, in cases where Gunrock lacks knowledge on a specific topic of conversation or doesn’t know how to answer a question, we programmed our socialbot to still acknowledge each user requests to maintain natural interactions. |
Calling all UC Davis Students |
January 2020 |
As our team works towards creating new templates to improve the quality of Gunrock's conversations, we hope to enlist the help of UC Davis students in this year's initial feedback period. This Thursday, we will be hosting our first launch party to encourage students to try out our Alexa system! Getting user input is very valuable to us, and we hope to acquire valuable feedback on a working system that will be competing internationally against other university social bots. We encourage all UC Davis students to come out for some pizza and get some first hand experience chatting with the future of conversational AI. DATE: Thursday, January 23 TIME: 11AM - 2PM LOCATION: Academic Surge 2306 RSVP: https://bit.ly/2uiMGzE |
Starting the competition.... |
June 2019 |