As people learn to interact with AI assistants such as Alexa, their needs change and become more complex. Alexa must evolve accordingly, and offer more sophisticated experiences, which require addressing increasingly complex AI research challenges. In the last few years, Amazon has offered university teams a chance to partner with Amazon scientists in order push the boundaries of the state of the art in conversational AI via the Alexa Prize challenge. This competition gives a framework for selected student teams to build agents, or “bots”, served by Alexa, which can converse with real Alexa users.