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 interactive, university challenge gives customers voice control of a virtual robot in a relaxed puzzle game with escape room elements. Under the hood it's a scientific research tool to advance conversational embodied AI and human-AI interaction. The challenge can be launched on Alexa Show and Fire TV devices using the phrase below.

Challenges

Learn more about the three Alexa Prize challenges.
  • "Alexa, play with robot"


    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.
  • "Alexa, let's work together!"


    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.
  • "Alexa, let's chat"


    The grand challenge is focused on creating a SocialBot, an Alexa skill that converses coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics and news events for 20-minutes, while achieving an average rating of at least 4.0/5.0.

Resources

Find more information about the Alexa Prize.
  • 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
    Song_about_summer - stock.adobe.com
    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.
Videos
Hear from university teams, faculty members, and Amazon scientists.

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
Dilek Hakkani-Tür at WeCNLP
Next-generation assistants won’t just be sitting in your kitchen or living room, and responding to your questions or requests... They will be ambient and mobile, helping customers accomplish tasks in the real-world through better situated intelligence. The goal of the SimBot Challenge is to advance the science so that future generations of virtual assistants are capable of learning continuously, and are imbued with a more generalized intelligence.
Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Alexa AI senior principal scientist

Latest news

The latest updates, stories, and more about Alexa Prize.
CA, ON, Toronto
To ensure a great internship experience, please keep these things in mind. This is a full time internship and requires an individual to work 40 hours a week for the duration of the internship. Amazon requires an intern to be located where their assigned team is. Amazon is happy to provide relocation and housing assistance if you are located 50 miles or further from the office location. Are you a Masters student interested in machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, automated reasoning, or robotics? We are looking for skilled scientists capable of putting theory into practice through experimentation and invention, leveraging science techniques and implementing systems to work on massive datasets in an effort to tackle never-before-solved problems. A successful candidate will be a self-starter comfortable with ambiguity, strong attention to detail, and the ability to work in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment. As an Applied Science Intern, you will own the design and development of end-to-end systems. You’ll have the opportunity to create technical roadmaps, and drive production level projects that will support Amazon Science. You will work closely with Amazon scientists, and other science interns to develop solutions and deploy them into production. The ideal scientist must have the ability to work with diverse groups of people and cross-functional teams to solve complex business problems. Amazon Science gives insight into the company’s approach to customer-obsessed scientific innovation. Amazon fundamentally believes that scientific innovation is essential to being the most customer-centric company in the world. It’s the company’s ability to have an impact at scale that allows us to attract some of the brightest minds in artificial intelligence and related fields. Our scientists use our working backwards method to enrich the way we live and work. For more information on the Amazon Science community please visit https://www.amazon.science.
US, WA, Seattle
To ensure a great internship experience, please keep these things in mind. This is a full time internship and requires an individual to work 40 hours a week for the duration of the internship. Amazon requires an intern to be located where their assigned team is. Amazon is happy to provide relocation and housing assistance if you are located 50 miles or further from the office location. We are looking for Masters or PhD students excited about working on Automated Reasoning or Storage System problems at the intersection of theory and practice to drive innovation and provide value for our customers. AWS Automated Reasoning teams deliver tools that are called billions of times daily. Amazon development teams are integrating automated-reasoning tools such as Dafny, P, and SAW into their development processes, raising the bar on the security, durability, availability, and quality of our products. AWS Automated Reasoning teams are changing how computer systems built on top of the cloud are developed and operated. AWS Automated Reasoning teams work in areas including: Distributed proof search, SAT and SMT solvers, Reasoning about distributed systems, Automating regulatory compliance, Program analysis and synthesis, Security and privacy, Cryptography, Static analysis, Property-based testing, Model-checking, Deductive verification, compilation into mainstream programming languages, Automatic test generation, and Static and dynamic methods for concurrent systems. AWS Storage Systems teams manage trillions of objects in storage, retrieving them with predictable low latency, building software that deploys to thousands of hosts, achieving 99.999999999% (you didn’t read that wrong, that’s 11 nines!) durability. AWS storage services grapple with exciting problems at enormous scale. Amazon S3 powers businesses across the globe that make the lives of customers better every day, and forms the backbone for applications at all scales and in all industries ranging from multimedia to genomics. This scale and data diversity requires constant innovation in algorithms, systems and modeling. AWS Storage Systems teams work in areas including: Error-correcting coding and durability modeling, system and distributed system performance optimization and modeling, designing and implementing distributed, multi-tenant systems, formal verification and strong, practical assurances of correctness, bits-IOPS-Watts: the interplay between computation, performance, and energy, data compression - both general-purpose and domain specific, research challenges with storage media, both existing and emerging, and exploring the intersection between storage and quantum technologies. As an Applied Science Intern, you will work closely with Amazon scientists and other science interns to develop solutions and deploy them into production. The ideal scientist must have the ability to work with diverse groups of people and cross-functional teams to solve complex business problems. A successful candidate will be a self-starter with strong attention to detail and the ability to thrive in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment who is comfortable with ambiguity. Amazon believes that scientific innovation is essential to being the world’s most customer-centric company. Our ability to have impact at scale allows us to attract some of the brightest minds in Automated Reasoning and related fields. Our scientists work backwards to produce innovative solutions that delight our customers. Please visit https://www.amazon.science (https://www.amazon.science/) for more information.
US, WA, Seattle
To ensure a great internship experience, please keep these things in mind. This is a full time internship and requires an individual to work 40 hours a week for the duration of the internship. Amazon requires an intern to be located where their assigned team is. Amazon is happy to provide relocation and housing assistance if you are located 50 miles or further from the office location. Help us develop the algorithms and models that power computer vision services at Amazon, such as Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Go, Visual Search, and more! We are combining computer vision, mobile robots, advanced end-of-arm tooling and high-degree of freedom movement to solve real-world problems at huge scale. As an intern, you will help build solutions where visual input helps the customers shop, anticipate technological advances, work with leading edge technology, focus on highly targeted customer use-cases, and launch products that solve problems for Amazon customers. A successful candidate will be a self-starter comfortable with ambiguity, strong attention to detail, and the ability to work in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment. You will own the design and development of end-to-end systems and have the opportunity to write technical white papers, create technical roadmaps, and drive production level projects that will support Amazon Science. You will work closely with Amazon scientists, and other science interns to develop solutions and deploy them into production. The ideal scientist must have the ability to work with diverse groups of people and cross-functional teams to solve complex business problems. Amazon Science gives insight into the company’s approach to customer-obsessed scientific innovation. Amazon fundamentally believes that scientific innovation is essential to being the most customer-centric company in the world. It’s the company’s ability to have an impact at scale that allows us to attract some of the brightest minds in artificial intelligence and related fields. Amazon Scientist use our working backwards method to enrich the way we live and work. For more information on the Amazon Science community please visit https://www.amazon.science
US, WA, Seattle
To ensure a great internship experience, please keep these things in mind. This is a full time internship and requires an individual to work 40 hours a week for the duration of the internship. Amazon requires an intern to be located where their assigned team is. Amazon is happy to provide relocation and housing assistance if you are located 50 miles or further from the office location. Are you a Masters or PhD student interested in machine learning? We are looking for skilled scientists capable of putting Machine Learning theory into practice through experimentation and invention, leveraging machine learning techniques (such as random forest, Bayesian networks, ensemble learning, clustering, etc.), and implementing learning systems to work on massive datasets in an effort to tackle never-before-solved problems. A successful candidate will be a self-starter comfortable with ambiguity, strong attention to detail, and the ability to work in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment. As an Applied Science Intern, you will own the design and development of end-to-end systems. You’ll have the opportunity to create technical roadmaps, and drive production level projects that will support Amazon Science. You will work closely with Amazon scientists, and other science interns to develop solutions and deploy them into production. The ideal scientist must have the ability to work with diverse groups of people and cross-functional teams to solve complex business problems. Amazon Science gives insight into the company’s approach to customer-obsessed scientific innovation. Amazon fundamentally believes that scientific innovation is essential to being the most customer-centric company in the world. It’s the company’s ability to have an impact at scale that allows us to attract some of the brightest minds in artificial intelligence and related fields. Our scientists use our working backwards method to enrich the way we live and work. For more information on the Amazon Science community please visit https://www.amazon.science.
US, WA, Seattle
To ensure a great internship experience, please keep these things in mind. This is a full time internship and requires an individual to work 40 hours a week for the duration of the internship. Amazon requires an intern to be located where their assigned team is. Amazon is happy to provide relocation and housing assistance if you are located 50 miles or further from the office location. Do you have a strong machine learning background and want to help build new speech and language technology? Amazon is looking for Master's students who are ready to tackle some of the most interesting research problems on the leading edge of natural language processing. We are hiring in all areas of spoken language understanding: NLP, NLU, ASR, text-to-speech (TTS), and more! A successful candidate will be a self-starter comfortable with ambiguity, strong attention to detail, and the ability to work in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment. As an Applied Science Intern, you will develop and implement novel scalable algorithms and modeling techniques to advance the state-of-the-art in technology areas at the intersection of ML, NLP, search, and deep learning. You will work side-by-side with global experts in speech and language to solve challenging groundbreaking research problems on production scale data. The ideal candidate must have the ability to work with diverse groups of people and cross-functional teams to solve complex business problems. Amazon fundamentally believes that scientific innovation is essential to being the most customer-centric company in the world. Please visit our website to stay updated with the research our teams are working on: https://www.amazon.science/research-areas/conversational-ai-natural-language-processing
US, WA, Seattle
To ensure a great internship experience, please keep these things in mind. This is a full time internship and requires an individual to work 40 hours a week for the duration of the internship. Amazon requires an intern to be located where their assigned team is. Amazon is happy to provide relocation and housing assistance if you are located 50 miles or further from the office location. The Research team at Amazon works passionately to apply cutting-edge advances in technology to solve real-world problems. Do you have a strong machine learning background and want to help build new speech and language technology? Do you welcome the challenge to apply optimization theory into practice through experimentation and invention? Would you love to help us develop the algorithms and models that power computer vision services at Amazon, such as Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Go, Visual Search, etc? At Amazon we hire research science interns to work in a number of domains including Operations Research, Optimization, Speech Technologies, Computer Vision, Robotics, and more! As an intern, you will be challenged to apply theory into practice through experimentation and invention, develop new algorithms using mathematical programming techniques for complex problems, implement prototypes and work with massive datasets. Amazon has a culture of data-driven decision-making, and the expectation is that analytics are timely, accurate, innovative and actionable. Amazon Science gives insight into the company’s approach to customer-obsessed scientific innovation. Amazon fundamentally believes that scientific innovation is essential to being the most customer-centric company in the world. It’s the company’s ability to have an impact at scale that allows us to attract some of the brightest minds in artificial intelligence and related fields. Amazon Scientist use our working backwards method to enrich the way we live and work. For more information on the Amazon Science community please visit https://www.amazon.science.
CA, ON, Toronto
To ensure a great internship experience, please keep these things in mind. This is a full time internship and requires an individual to work 40 hours a week for the duration of the internship. Amazon requires an intern to be located where their assigned team is. Amazon is happy to provide relocation and housing assistance if you are located 50 miles or further from the office location. Are you a PhD student interested in machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, automated reasoning, or robotics? We are looking for skilled scientists capable of putting theory into practice through experimentation and invention, leveraging science techniques and implementing systems to work on massive datasets in an effort to tackle never-before-solved problems. A successful candidate will be a self-starter comfortable with ambiguity, strong attention to detail, and the ability to work in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment. As an Applied Science Intern, you will own the design and development of end-to-end systems. You’ll have the opportunity to create technical roadmaps, and drive production level projects that will support Amazon Science. You will work closely with Amazon scientists, and other science interns to develop solutions and deploy them into production. The ideal scientist must have the ability to work with diverse groups of people and cross-functional teams to solve complex business problems. Amazon Science gives insight into the company’s approach to customer-obsessed scientific innovation. Amazon fundamentally believes that scientific innovation is essential to being the most customer-centric company in the world. It’s the company’s ability to have an impact at scale that allows us to attract some of the brightest minds in artificial intelligence and related fields. Our scientists use our working backwards method to enrich the way we live and work. For more information on the Amazon Science community please visit https://www.amazon.science.
US, WA, Seattle
To ensure a great internship experience, please keep these things in mind. This is a full time internship and requires an individual to work 40 hours a week for the duration of the internship. Amazon requires an intern to be located where their assigned team is. Amazon is happy to provide relocation and housing assistance if you are located 50 miles or further from the office location. We are looking for PhD students excited about working on Automated Reasoning or Storage System problems at the intersection of theory and practice to drive innovation and provide value for our customers. AWS Automated Reasoning teams deliver tools that are called billions of times daily. Amazon development teams are integrating automated-reasoning tools such as Dafny, P, and SAW into their development processes, raising the bar on the security, durability, availability, and quality of our products. AWS Automated Reasoning teams are changing how computer systems built on top of the cloud are developed and operated. AWS Automated Reasoning teams work in areas including: Distributed proof search, SAT and SMT solvers, Reasoning about distributed systems, Automating regulatory compliance, Program analysis and synthesis, Security and privacy, Cryptography, Static analysis, Property-based testing, Model-checking, Deductive verification, compilation into mainstream programming languages, Automatic test generation, and Static and dynamic methods for concurrent systems. AWS Storage Systems teams manage trillions of objects in storage, retrieving them with predictable low latency, building software that deploys to thousands of hosts, achieving 99.999999999% (you didn’t read that wrong, that’s 11 nines!) durability. AWS storage services grapple with exciting problems at enormous scale. Amazon S3 powers businesses across the globe that make the lives of customers better every day, and forms the backbone for applications at all scales and in all industries ranging from multimedia to genomics. This scale and data diversity requires constant innovation in algorithms, systems and modeling. AWS Storage Systems teams work in areas including: Error-correcting coding and durability modeling, system and distributed system performance optimization and modeling, designing and implementing distributed, multi-tenant systems, formal verification and strong, practical assurances of correctness, bits-IOPS-Watts: the interplay between computation, performance, and energy, data compression - both general-purpose and domain specific, research challenges with storage media, both existing and emerging, and exploring the intersection between storage and quantum technologies. As an Applied Science Intern, you will work closely with Amazon scientists and other science interns to develop solutions and deploy them into production. The ideal scientist must have the ability to work with diverse groups of people and cross-functional teams to solve complex business problems. A successful candidate will be a self-starter with strong attention to detail and the ability to thrive in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment who is comfortable with ambiguity. Amazon believes that scientific innovation is essential to being the world’s most customer-centric company. Our ability to have impact at scale allows us to attract some of the brightest minds in Automated Reasoning and related fields. Our scientists work backwards to produce innovative solutions that delight our customers. Please visit https://www.amazon.science (https://www.amazon.science/) for more information.
US, WA, Seattle
To ensure a great internship experience, please keep these things in mind. This is a full time internship and requires an individual to work 40 hours a week for the duration of the internship. Amazon requires an intern to be located where their assigned team is. Amazon is happy to provide relocation and housing assistance if you are located 50 miles or further from the office location. Help us develop the algorithms and models that power computer vision services at Amazon, such as Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Go, Visual Search, and more! We are combining computer vision, mobile robots, advanced end-of-arm tooling and high-degree of freedom movement to solve real-world problems at huge scale. As an intern, you will help build solutions where visual input helps the customers shop, anticipate technological advances, work with leading edge technology, focus on highly targeted customer use-cases, and launch products that solve problems for Amazon customers. A successful candidate will be a self-starter comfortable with ambiguity, strong attention to detail, and the ability to work in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment. You will own the design and development of end-to-end systems and have the opportunity to write technical white papers, create technical roadmaps, and drive production level projects that will support Amazon Science. You will work closely with Amazon scientists, and other science interns to develop solutions and deploy them into production. The ideal scientist must have the ability to work with diverse groups of people and cross-functional teams to solve complex business problems. Amazon Science gives insight into the company’s approach to customer-obsessed scientific innovation. Amazon fundamentally believes that scientific innovation is essential to being the most customer-centric company in the world. It’s the company’s ability to have an impact at scale that allows us to attract some of the brightest minds in artificial intelligence and related fields. Amazon Scientist use our working backwards method to enrich the way we live and work. For more information on the Amazon Science community please visit https://www.amazon.science
US, WA, Seattle
To ensure a great internship experience, please keep these things in mind. This is a full time internship and requires an individual to work 40 hours a week for the duration of the internship. Amazon requires an intern to be located where their assigned team is. Amazon is happy to provide relocation and housing assistance if you are located 50 miles or further from the office location. Are you a PhD student interested in machine learning? We are looking for skilled scientists capable of putting Machine Learning theory into practice through experimentation and invention, leveraging machine learning techniques (such as random forest, Bayesian networks, ensemble learning, clustering, etc.), and implementing learning systems to work on massive datasets in an effort to tackle never-before-solved problems. A successful candidate will be a self-starter comfortable with ambiguity, strong attention to detail, and the ability to work in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment. As an Applied Science Intern, you will own the design and development of end-to-end systems. You’ll have the opportunity to create technical roadmaps, and drive production level projects that will support Amazon Science. You will work closely with Amazon scientists, and other science interns to develop solutions and deploy them into production. The ideal scientist must have the ability to work with diverse groups of people and cross-functional teams to solve complex business problems. Amazon Science gives insight into the company’s approach to customer-obsessed scientific innovation. Amazon fundamentally believes that scientific innovation is essential to being the most customer-centric company in the world. It’s the company’s ability to have an impact at scale that allows us to attract some of the brightest minds in artificial intelligence and related fields. Our scientists use our working backwards method to enrich the way we live and work. For more information on the Amazon Science community please visit https://www.amazon.science.