Alexa Prize Proceedings

The Alexa Prize Proceedings publishes the research in conversational AI from the competition. Amazon works closely with university teams to provide a testbed for research to address the challenges with dialog management, natural language understanding, contextual modeling, commonsense reasoning and response generation, and these proceedings seek to capture the advances in those areas that result from these efforts. Authors are free to make additional hardcopy publishing arrangements, but Amazon will not produce hardcopies of these volumes.
12 results found
  • Carnegie Mellon University
    Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 1 Proceedings
    2022
    Tartan is a multi-domain task-oriented bot that assists users with two different tasks: 1. cooking with recipes from Whole Foods and 2. doing projects from WikiHow. The bot’s system is divided into two stages. In the first stage, the bot assists the user in identifying a task that they want to do. In the second stage, the bot guides the users through sequences of step-by-step instructions. We developed
  • University of Glasgow
    Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 1 Proceedings
    2022
    We present GRILLBot, a multi-modal task-oriented voice assistant to guide users through complex real-world tasks for the Alexa TaskBot Challenge. An effective TaskBot has to guide a user through a long and complex task, be engaging, and help solve problems along the way. GRILLBot achieves this in the domains of cooking and home improvement by helping search over a large task corpus with mixed- initiative
  • National Taiwan University
    Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 1 Proceedings
    2022
    This paper introduces Miutsu, National Taiwan University’s Alexa Prize TaskBot, which is designed to assist users in completing tasks requiring multiple steps and decisions in two different domains – home improvement and cooking. We overview our system design and architectural goals, and detail the proposed core elements, including question answering, task retrieval, social chatting, and various conversational
  • Texas A&M University
    Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 1 Proceedings
    2022
    In this paper, we present Howdy Y’all, a multi-modal task-oriented dialogue agent developed for the 2021-2022 Alexa Prize TaskBot competition. Our design principles guiding Howdy Y’all aim for high user satisfaction through friendly and trustworthy encounters, minimization of negative conversation edge cases, and wide coverage over many tasks. Hence, Howdy Y’all is built upon a rapid prototyping platform
  • Ohio State University
    Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 1 Proceedings
    2022
    We present TacoBot, a task-oriented dialogue system built for the inaugural Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge, which assists users in completing multi-step cooking and home improvement tasks. TacoBot is designed with a user-centered principle and aspires to deliver a collaborative and accessible dialogue experience. Towards that end, it is equipped with accurate language understanding, flexible dialogue management
  • University of Pennsylvania
    Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 1 Proceedings
    2022
    We describe QuakerBot, a dialog system that helps users with household tasks and a participant in the Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge. QuakerBot can process a variety of user requests, search for instructions from web resources such as wikiHow or Whole Foods Market recipes, answer related questions, and so on. Its components simultaneously consist of large language models with an impressive few-shot performance
  • NOVA University Lisbon
    Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 1 Proceedings
    2022
    This paper describes the vision, scientific contributions, and technical details of the Task Wizard (TWIZ) team’s participation in the Alexa TaskBot Challenge 2021. Our bot design envisions the support of an engaging experience, where users are guided through multimodal conversations, towards the successful completion of the selected task. This is achieved through four key principles: a) robust dialog interaction
  • University of Massachusetts Amherst
    Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 1 Proceedings
    2022
    We present Maruna Bot, a Task-Oriented Dialogue System (TODS) that assists people in cooking or Do-It-Yourself (DIY) tasks using either a speech-only or multimodal (speech and screen) interface. Building such a system is challenging, because it touches many research areas including language understanding, text generation, task planning, dialogue state tracking, question answering, multi-modal retrieval,
  • University College London
    Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 1 Proceedings
    2022
    Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a long-standing area of exploration in the research community and has now penetrated both academia and industries with products such as Siri and Alexa. In this work, we present COoking-aNd-DIy-TAsk-based (Condita) ChatBot, a task-oriented dialogue system, for the 2021 Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge. Condita provides an engaging multi-modal agent that assists
  • University of California, Santa Barbara
    Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 1 Proceedings
    2022
    In this paper, we introduce Gauchobot, a task-oriented dialogue system developed for the Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge. We identified two main obstacles to building better conversational AI assistants in real-world applications. The first is great human efforts needed in data annotation and engineering a dialogue system that provides service in a new domain from scratch. The high cost, often ignored by

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US, WA, Seattle
WW Amazon Stores Finance Science (ASFS) works to leverage science and economics to drive improved financial results, foster data backed decisions, and embed science within Finance. ASFS is focused on developing products that empower controllership, improve business decisions and financial planning by understanding financial drivers, and innovate science capabilities for efficiency and scale. We are looking for a data scientist to lead high visibility initiatives for forecasting Amazon Stores' financials. You will develop new science-based forecasting methodologies and build scalable models to improve financial decision making and planning for senior leadership up to VP and SVP level. You will build new ML and statistical models from the ground up that aim to transform financial planning for Amazon Stores. We prize creative problem solvers with the ability to draw on an expansive methodological toolkit to transform financial decision-making with science. The ideal candidate combines data-science acumen with strong business judgment. You have versatile modeling skills and are comfortable owning and extracting insights from data. You are excited to learn from and alongside seasoned scientists, engineers, and business leaders. You are an excellent communicator and effectively translate technical findings into business action. Key job responsibilities Demonstrating thorough technical knowledge, effective exploratory data analysis, and model building using industry standard ML models Working with technical and non-technical stakeholders across every step of science project life cycle Collaborating with finance, product, data engineering, and software engineering teams to create production implementations for large-scale ML models Innovating by adapting new modeling techniques and procedures Presenting research results to our internal research community
US, WA, Seattle
This role will contribute to developing the Economics and Science products and services in the Fee domain, with specialization in supply chain systems and fees. Through the lens of economics, you will develop causal links for how Amazon, Sellers and Customers interact. You will be a key and senior scientist, advising Amazon leaders how to price our services. You will work on developing frameworks and scalable, repeatable models supporting optimal pricing and policy in the two-sided marketplace that is central to Amazon's business. The pricing for Amazon services is complex. You will partner with science and technology teams across Amazon including Advertising, Supply Chain, Operations, Prime, Consumer Pricing, and Finance. We are looking for an experienced Economist to improve our understanding of seller Economics, enhance our ability to estimate the causal impact of fees, and work with partner teams to design pricing policy changes. In this role, you will provide guidance to scientists to develop econometric models to influence our fee pricing worldwide. You will lead the development of causal models to help isolate the impact of fee and policy changes from other business actions, using experiments when possible, or observational data when not. Key job responsibilities The ideal candidate will have extensive Economics knowledge, demonstrated strength in practical and policy relevant structural econometrics, strong collaboration skills, proven ability to lead highly ambiguous and large projects, and a drive to deliver results. They will work closely with Economists, Data / Applied Scientists, Strategy Analysts, Data Engineers, and Product leads to integrate economic insights into policy and systems production. Familiarity with systems and services that constitute seller supply chains is a plus but not required. About the team The Stores Economics and Sciences team is a central science team that supports Amazon's Retail and Supply Chain leadership. We tackle some of Amazon's most challenging economics and machine learning problems, where our mandate is to impact the business on massive scale.
US, WA, Bellevue
We are looking for detail-oriented, organized, and responsible individuals who are eager to learn how to apply their causal inference and/or structural econometrics skillsets to solve real world problems. The intern will work in the area of Economics Intelligence in Amazon Returns and Recommerce Technology and Innovation and develop new, data-driven solutions to support the most critical components of this rapidly scaling team. Our PhD Economist Internship Program offers hands-on experience in applied economics, supported by mentorship, structured feedback, and professional development. Interns work on real business and research problems, building skills that prepare them for full-time economist roles at Amazon and beyond. You will learn how to build data sets and perform applied econometric analysis collaborating with economists, scientists, and product managers. These skills will translate well into writing applied chapters in your dissertation and provide you with work experience that may help you with placement. These are full-time positions at 40 hours per week, with compensation being awarded on an hourly basis. About the team The WWRR Economics Intelligence (RREI) team brings together Economists, Data Scientists, and Business Intelligence Engineers experts to delivers economic solutions focused on forecasting, causality, attribution, customer behavior for returns, recommerce, and sustainability domains.
US, WA, Bellevue
We are looking for detail-oriented, organized, and responsible individuals who are eager to learn how to apply their causal inference and/or structural econometrics skillsets to solve real world problems. The intern will work in the area of Economics Intelligence in Amazon Returns and Recommerce Technology and Innovation and develop new, data-driven solutions to support the most critical components of this rapidly scaling team. Our PhD Economist Internship Program offers hands-on experience in applied economics, supported by mentorship, structured feedback, and professional development. Interns work on real business and research problems, building skills that prepare them for full-time economist roles at Amazon and beyond. You will learn how to build data sets and perform applied econometric analysis collaborating with economists, scientists, and product managers. These skills will translate well into writing applied chapters in your dissertation and provide you with work experience that may help you with placement. These are full-time positions at 40 hours per week, with compensation being awarded on an hourly basis. About the team The WWRR Economics Intelligence (RREI) team brings together Economists, Data Scientists, and Business Intelligence Engineers experts to delivers economic solutions focused on forecasting, causality, attribution, customer behavior for returns, recommerce, and sustainability domains.
US, WA, Seattle
Innovators wanted! Are you an entrepreneur? A builder? A dreamer? This role is part of an Amazon Special Projects team that takes the company’s Think Big leadership principle to the next level. We focus on creating entirely new products and services with a goal of positively impacting the lives of our customers. No industries or subject areas are out of bounds. If you’re interested in innovating at scale to address big challenges in the world, this is the team for you. As a Research Scientist, you will work with a unique and gifted team developing exciting products for consumers and collaborate with cross-functional teams. Our team rewards intellectual curiosity while maintaining a laser-focus in bringing products to market. Competitive candidates are responsive, flexible, and able to succeed within an open, collaborative, entrepreneurial, startup-like environment. At the intersection of both academic and applied research in this product area, you have the opportunity to work together with some of the most talented scientists, engineers, and product managers. Here at Amazon, we embrace our differences. We are committed to furthering our culture of inclusion. We have thirteen employee-led affinity groups, reaching 40,000 employees in over 190 chapters globally. We are constantly learning through programs that are local, regional, and global. Amazon’s culture of inclusion is reinforced within our 16 Leadership Principles, which remind team members to seek diverse perspectives, learn and be curious, and earn trust. Our team highly values work-life balance, mentorship and career growth. We believe striking the right balance between your personal and professional life is critical to life-long happiness and fulfillment. We care about your career growth and strive to assign projects and offer training that will challenge you to become your best.
US, WA, Seattle
Amazon has co-founded and signed The Climate Pledge, a commitment to reach net zero carbon by 2040. As a team, we leverage GenAI, sensors, smart home devices, cloud services, material science, and Alexa to build products that have a meaningful impact for customers and the climate. In alignment with this bold corporate goal, the Amazon Devices & Services organization is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Senior Applied Scientist to help build revolutionary products with potential for major societal impact. Great candidates for this position will have expertise in the areas of agentic AI applications, deep learning, time series analysis, LLMs, and multimodal systems. This includes experience designing autonomous AI agents that can reason, plan, and execute multi-step tasks, building tool-augmented LLM systems with access to external APIs and data sources, implementing multi-agent orchestration, and developing RAG architectures that combine LLMs with domain-specific knowledge bases. You will strive for simplicity and creativity, demonstrating high judgment backed by statistical proof. Key job responsibilities As a Senior Applied Scientist on the Energy Science team, you'll design and deploy agentic AI systems that autonomously analyze data, plan solutions, and execute recommendations. You'll build multi-agent architectures where specialized AI agents coordinate to solve complex optimization problems, and develop tool-augmented LLM applications that integrate with external data sources and APIs to deliver context-aware insights. Your work involves creating multimodal AI systems that synthesize diverse data streams, while implementing RAG pipelines that ground large language models in domain-specific knowledge bases. You'll apply advanced machine learning and deep learning techniques to time series analysis, forecasting, and pattern recognition. Beyond technical innovation, you'll drive end-to-end product development from research through production deployment, collaborating with cross-functional teams to translate AI capabilities into customer experiences. You'll establish rigorous experimentation frameworks to validate model performance and measure business impact, building AI-driven products with potential for major societal impact.
US, CA, San Francisco
Amazon launched the AGI Lab to develop foundational capabilities for useful AI agents. We built Nova Act - a new AI model trained to perform actions within a web browser. The team builds AI/ML infrastructure that powers our production systems to run performantly at high scale. We’re also enabling practical AI to make our customers more productive, empowered, and fulfilled. In particular, our work combines large language models (LLMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) to solve reasoning, planning, and world modeling in both virtual and physical environments. Our lab is a small, talent-dense team with the resources and scale of Amazon. Each team in the lab has the autonomy to move fast and the long-term commitment to pursue high-risk, high-payoff research. We’re entering an exciting new era where agents can redefine what AI makes possible. We’d love for you to join our lab and build it from the ground up! Key job responsibilities This role will lead a team of SDEs building AI agents infrastructure from launch to scale. The role requires the ability to span across ML/AI system architecture and infrastructure. You will work closely with application developers and scientists to have a impact on the Agentic AI industry. We're looking for a Software Development Manager who is energized by building high performance systems, making an impact and thrives in fast-paced, collaborative environments. About the team Check out the Nova Act tools our team built on on nova.amazon.com/act
US, WA, Seattle
MULTIPLE POSITIONS AVAILABLE Employer: AMAZON WEB SERVICES, INC. Offered Position: Applied Scientist III Job Location: Seattle, Washington Job Number: AMZ9674037 Position Responsibilities: Participate in the design, development, evaluation, deployment and updating of data-driven models and analytical solutions for machine learning (ML) and/or natural language (NL) applications. Develop and/or apply statistical modeling techniques (e.g. Bayesian models and deep neural networks), optimization methods, and other ML techniques to different applications in business and engineering. Routinely build and deploy ML models on available data, and run and analyze experiments in a production environment. Identify new opportunities for research in order to meet business goals. Research and implement novel ML and statistical approaches to add value to the business. Mentor junior engineers and scientists. Position Requirements: Master’s degree or foreign equivalent degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Engineering, or a related field and two years of research or work experience in the job offered, or as a Research Scientist, Research Assistant, Software Engineer, or a related occupation. Employer will accept a Bachelor’s degree or foreign equivalent degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Engineering, or a related field and five years of progressive post-baccalaureate research or work experience in the job offered or a related occupation as equivalent to the Master’s degree and two years of research or work experience. Must have one year of research or work experience in the following skill(s): (1) programming in Java, C++, Python, or equivalent programming language; and (2) conducting the analysis and development of various supervised and unsupervised machine learning models for moderately complex projects in business, science, or engineering. Amazon.com is an Equal Opportunity-Affirmative Action Employer – Minority / Female / Disability / Veteran / Gender Identity / Sexual Orientation. 40 hours / week, 8:00am-5:00pm, Salary Range $167,100/year to $226,100/year. Amazon is a total compensation company. Dependent on the position offered, equity, sign-on payments, and other forms of compensation may be provided as part of a total compensation package, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits. For more information, visit: https://www.aboutamazon.com/workplace/employee-benefits.#0000
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Amazon Health Services (One Medical) About Us: At Health AI, we're revolutionizing healthcare delivery through innovative AI-enabled solutions. As part of Amazon Health Services and One Medical, we're on a mission to make quality healthcare more accessible while improving patient outcomes. Our work directly impacts millions of lives by empowering patients and enabling healthcare providers to deliver more meaningful care. Role Overview: We're seeking an Applied Scientist to join our dynamic team in building state of the art AI/ML solutions for healthcare. This role offers a unique opportunity to work at the intersection of artificial intelligence and healthcare, developing solutions that will shape the future of medical services delivery. Key job responsibilities • Lead end-to-end development of AI/ML solutions for Amazon Health organization, including Amazon Pharmacy and One Medical • Research, design, and implement state-of-the-art machine learning models, with a focus on Large Language Models (LLMs) and Visual Language Models (VLMs) • Optimize and fine-tune models for production deployment, including model distillation for improved latency • Drive scientific innovation while maintaining a strong focus on practical business outcomes • Collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate complex technical solutions into tangible customer benefits • Contribute to the broader Amazon Health scientific community and help shape our technical roadmap
US, CA, Santa Clara
Amazon Quick Suite is an enterprise AI platform that transforms how organizations work with their data and knowledge. Combining generative AI-powered search, deep research capabilities, intelligent agents and automations, and comprehensive business intelligence, Quick Suite serves tens of thousands of users. Our platform processes thousands of queries monthly, helping teams make faster, data-driven decisions while maintaining enterprise-grade security and governance. From natural language interactions with complex datasets to automated workflows and custom AI agents, Quick Suite is redefining workplace productivity at unprecedented scale. We are seeking a Data Scientist II to join our Quick Data team, focusing on evaluation and benchmarking data development for Quick Suite features, with particular emphasis on Research and other generative AI capabilities. Our mission is to engineer high-quality datasets that are essential to the success of Amazon Quick Suite. From human evaluations and Responsible AI safeguards to Retrieval-Augmented Generation and beyond, our work ensures that Generative AI is enterprise-ready, safe, and effective for users at scale. As part of our diverse team—including data scientists, engineers, language engineers, linguists, and program managers—you will collaborate closely with science, engineering, and product teams. We are driven by customer obsession and a commitment to excellence. Key job responsibilities In this role, you will leverage data-centric AI principles to assess the impact of data on model performance and the broader machine learning pipeline. You will apply Generative AI techniques to evaluate how well our data represents human language and conduct experiments to measure downstream interactions. Specific responsibilities include: * Design and develop comprehensive evaluation and benchmarking datasets for Quick Suite AI-powered features * Leverage LLMs for synthetic data corpora generation; data evaluation and quality assessment using LLM-as-a-judge settings * Create ground truth datasets with high-quality question-answer pairs across diverse domains and use cases * Lead human annotation initiatives and model evaluation audits to ensure data quality and relevance * Develop and refine annotation guidelines and quality frameworks for evaluation tasks * Conduct statistical analysis to measure model performance, identify failure patterns, and guide improvement strategies * Collaborate with ML scientists and engineers to translate evaluation insights into actionable product improvements * Build scalable data pipelines and tools to support continuous evaluation and benchmarking efforts * Contribute to Responsible AI initiatives by developing safety and fairness evaluation datasets About the team Why AWS? Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. We pioneered cloud computing and never stopped innovating — that’s why customers from the most successful startups to Global 500 companies trust our robust suite of products and services to power their businesses. Inclusive Team Culture Here at AWS, it’s in our nature to learn and be curious. Our employee-led affinity groups foster a culture of inclusion that empower us to be proud of our differences. Ongoing events and learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon conferences, inspire us to never stop embracing our uniqueness. Mentorship & Career Growth We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional. Work/Life Balance We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why we strive for flexibility as part of our working culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve in the cloud. Hybrid Work We value innovation and recognize this sometimes requires uninterrupted time to focus on a build. We also value in-person collaboration and time spent face-to-face. Our team affords employees options to work in the office every day or in a flexible, hybrid work model near one of our U.S. Amazon offices.