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 grand challenge is focused on creating a SocialBot, an Alexa skill that converses coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics and news.
  • 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.
  • 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.

Resources

  • 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.

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

Latest news

The latest updates, stories, and more about Alexa Prize.
US, WA, Seattle
Are you interested in shaping the future of entertainment? Prime Video's technology teams are creating best-in-class digital video experience. Prime Video is a first-stop entertainment destination offering customers a vast collection of premium programming in one app available across thousands of devices. Prime members can customize their viewing experience and find their favorite movies, series, documentaries, and live sports – including Amazon MGM Studios-produced series and movies; licensed fan favorites; and exclusive access to coverage of live sports. All customers regardless of whether they have a Prime membership or not, can access programming from subscriptions such as Apple TV, Peacock Premium Plus, HBO Max, FOX One, Crunchyroll and MGM+, as well as more than 900 free ad-support (FAST) Channels, rent or buy titles, and enjoy even more content for free with ads. The Prime Video Personalization and Discovery team matches customers with the right content at the right time, at all touch points throughout the content discovery journey. We are looking for a customer-focused, solutions-oriented Data Scientist to help build new data-driven frameworks to understand what makes new personalization and content discovery innovations successful for users and the business. You'll be part of an embedded science team on projects that are fast-paced, challenging, and ultimately influence what millions of customers around the world see when the log into Prime Video. The ideal candidate brings strong problem-solving skills, stakeholder communication skills, and the ability to balance technical rigor with delivery speed and customer impact. You will build cross-functional support within Prime Video, assess business problems, define metrics, and support iterative scientific solutions that balance short-term delivery with long-term science roadmaps. Key job responsibilities - Use advanced statistical and machine learning techniques to extract insights from complex, large-scale data sets - Design and implement end-to-end data science workflows, from data acquisition and cleaning to model development, testing, and deployment - Support scalable, self-service data analyses by building datasets for analytics, reporting and ML use cases - Partner with product stakeholders and senior science peers to identify strategic data-driven opportunities to improve the customer experience - Communicate findings, conclusions, and recommendations to technical and non-technical stakeholders - Stay up-to-date on the latest data science tools, techniques, and best practices and help evangelize them across the organization
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Amazon Music is an immersive audio entertainment service that deepens connections between fans, artists, and creators. From personalized music playlists to exclusive podcasts, concert livestreams to artist merch, Amazon Music is innovating at some of the most exciting intersections of music and culture. We offer experiences that serve all listeners with our different tiers of service: Prime members get access to all the music in shuffle mode, and top ad-free podcasts, included with their membership; customers can upgrade to Amazon Music Unlimited for unlimited, on-demand access to 100 million songs, including millions in HD, Ultra HD, and spatial audio; and anyone can listen for free by downloading the Amazon Music app or via Alexa-enabled devices. Join us for the opportunity to influence how Amazon Music engages fans, artists, and creators on a global scale. Learn more at https://www.amazon.com/music. The Music Catalog Quality team at Amazon Music serves a key role in developing solutions to ensure and improve the quality of catalog metadata and content across the music streaming experience. We create solutions that detect, measure, and remediate quality issues in music metadata - including artist information, track attributes, versions, content tags, and provide actionable insights that enable continuous improvement of the catalog. We leverage a host of scientific and engineering technologies to accomplish this mission, including Generative AI, classical ML, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, and automated data validation pipelines. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist, 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. Other responsibilities include: - Collaborate with scientists, engineers, and product managers to define and frame business problems as ML or optimization tasks. - Use machine learning, deep learning, LLMs and Agentic AI techniques to create scalable solutions for business problems - Analyze and extract relevant information from large amounts of Amazon's data to help automate and optimize key processes - Design, development and evaluation of AI models for predictive learning - Research and implement novel machine learning and statistical approaches - Implement scalable data pipelines and model-serving systems. - Analyze experimental results, draw insights, and refine models to improve accuracy and robustness. - Communicate findings and recommendations to technical and non-technical audiences.
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Amazon Music is an immersive audio entertainment service that deepens connections between fans, artists, and creators. From personalized music playlists to exclusive podcasts, concert livestreams to artist merch, Amazon Music is innovating at some of the most exciting intersections of music and culture. We offer experiences that serve all listeners with our different tiers of service: Prime members get access to all the music in shuffle mode, and top ad-free podcasts, included with their membership; customers can upgrade to Amazon Music Unlimited for unlimited, on-demand access to 100 million songs, including millions in HD, Ultra HD, and spatial audio; and anyone can listen for free by downloading the Amazon Music app or via Alexa-enabled devices. Join us for the opportunity to influence how Amazon Music engages fans, artists, and creators on a global scale. Learn more at https://www.amazon.com/music. The Music Catalog Quality team at Amazon Music serves a key role in developing solutions to ensure and improve the quality of catalog metadata and content across the music streaming experience. We create solutions that detect, measure, and remediate quality issues in music metadata - including artist information, track attributes, versions, content tags, and provide actionable insights that enable continuous improvement of the catalog. We leverage a host of scientific and engineering technologies to accomplish this mission, including Generative AI, classical ML, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, and automated data validation pipelines. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist, 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. Other responsibilities include: - Collaborate with scientists, engineers, and product managers to define and frame business problems as ML or optimization tasks. - Use machine learning, deep learning, LLMs and Agentic AI techniques to create scalable solutions for business problems - Analyze and extract relevant information from large amounts of Amazon's data to help automate and optimize key processes - Design, development and evaluation of AI models for predictive learning - Research and implement novel machine learning and statistical approaches - Implement scalable data pipelines and model-serving systems. - Analyze experimental results, draw insights, and refine models to improve accuracy and robustness. - Communicate findings and recommendations to technical and non-technical audiences.
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Amazon Music is an immersive audio entertainment service that deepens connections between fans, artists, and creators. From personalized music playlists to exclusive podcasts, concert livestreams to artist merch, Amazon Music is innovating at some of the most exciting intersections of music and culture. We offer experiences that serve all listeners with our different tiers of service: Prime members get access to all the music in shuffle mode, and top ad-free podcasts, included with their membership; customers can upgrade to Amazon Music Unlimited for unlimited, on-demand access to 100 million songs, including millions in HD, Ultra HD, and spatial audio; and anyone can listen for free by downloading the Amazon Music app or via Alexa-enabled devices. Join us for the opportunity to influence how Amazon Music engages fans, artists, and creators on a global scale. Learn more at https://www.amazon.com/music. The Music Catalog Quality team at Amazon Music serves a key role in developing solutions to ensure and improve the quality of catalog metadata and content across the music streaming experience. We create solutions that detect, measure, and remediate quality issues in music metadata - including artist information, track attributes, versions, content tags, and provide actionable insights that enable continuous improvement of the catalog. We leverage a host of scientific and engineering technologies to accomplish this mission, including Generative AI, classical ML, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, and automated data validation pipelines. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist, 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. Other responsibilities include: - Collaborate with scientists, engineers, and product managers to define and frame business problems as ML or optimization tasks. - Use machine learning, deep learning, LLMs and Agentic AI techniques to create scalable solutions for business problems - Analyze and extract relevant information from large amounts of Amazon's data to help automate and optimize key processes - Design, development and evaluation of AI models for predictive learning - Research and implement novel machine learning and statistical approaches - Implement scalable data pipelines and model-serving systems. - Analyze experimental results, draw insights, and refine models to improve accuracy and robustness. - Communicate findings and recommendations to technical and non-technical audiences.
US, CA, San Diego
Do you want to join an innovative team of scientists and engineers who use terabytes of data and create state-of-the-art Generative AI algorithms to push the boundaries of AI creativity? We are building foundational behavioral models for Amazon Stores using Generative AI, LLMs and Large Model training techniques that fuses general world knowledge, customer shopping behavior and Amazon e-commerce domain knowledge. We are looking for scientists who are passionate about technology, innovation, and customer experience, and are ready to make a lasting impact on the industry using intelligent and transformative AI applications. Working closely with cross-functional teams, you will be an essential part of every stage of AI development, from ideation and design to rigorous testing and successful deployment, ensuring our AI projects drive innovation and provide value for our customers. If you’re fired up about being part of a dynamic, driven team, then this is your moment to join us on this exciting journey! Key job responsibilities In this role you will leverage your background and expertise to lead developing foundational behavioral model for Amazon Stores using Generative AI, LLM and Large Model training techniques. On a day-to-day basis, you will: - Research and implement new algorithms and architectures for generative AI applications. - Optimize model performance and scalability for inference and deployment. - Collaborate with other talented applied scientists and engineers to gather and preprocess large datasets and develop an improved training infrastructure that accelerates innovation. - Experiment with SOTA methods to improve generative AI model quality. - Provide technical expertise and guidance to support the integration of generative AI solutions into various products and services.
IN, KA, Bengaluru
The Music Catalog Quality team at Amazon Music serves a key role in developing solutions to ensure and improve the quality of catalog metadata and content across the music streaming experience. We create solutions that detect, measure, and remediate quality issues in music metadata - including artist information, track attributes, versions, content tags, and provide actionable insights that enable continuous improvement of the catalog. We leverage a host of scientific and engineering technologies to accomplish this mission, including Generative AI, classical ML, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, and automated data validation pipelines. As an Applied Science Manager on the team, you will lead a team of scientists to define and execute a transformative vision for holistic catalog quality measurement, metadata enrichment, and content integrity. Your team will own the science solutions for foundational quality detection frameworks, metadata validation and correction technologies, state-of-the-art algorithms to identify and resolve catalog anomalies (violative content, duplicative/low value content, misattributed tracks, incorrect metadata), and/or agentic AI solutions that help internal teams quickly surface and fix quality issues to ensure customers receive accurate, complete catalog experiences. Key job responsibilities You independently manage a team of scientists. You identify the needs of your team and effectively grow, hire, and promote scientists to maintain a high-performing team. You have a broad understanding of scientific techniques, several of which may fall out of your specific job function. You define the strategic vision for your team. You establish a roadmap and successfully deliver scientific solutions that innovate on catalog quality detection, metadata enrichment, and content integrity. You define clear goals for your team and effectively prioritize, balancing short-term quality improvements and long-term innovation in catalog intelligence. You establish clear and effective metrics and scientific process to enforce consistent, high-quality artifact delivery and measurable catalog quality improvements. You proactively identify risks and bring them to the attention of your manager, customers, and stakeholders with plans for mitigation before they become roadblocks. You know when to escalate. You communicate ideas effectively, both verbally and in writing, to all types of audiences. You author strategic documentation for your team. You communicate issues and options with leaders in such a way that facilitates understanding and that leads to a decision. You work successfully with customers, leaders, and engineering teams. You foster a constructive dialogue, harmonize discordant views, and lead the resolution of contentious issues. About the team We are a team of scientists and MLEs focused on music catalog quality and metadata intelligence. You will work with colleagues with deep expertise in ML, NLP, CV, Gen AI, and data quality systems with a diverse range of backgrounds. We partner closely with top-notch engineers, product managers, content operations teams, and other scientists with expertise in music metadata, content classification, and building scalable modeling and software solutions that keep the Amazon Music catalog accurate, complete, and trustworthy.
US, CA, San Diego
Do you want to join an innovative team of scientists and engineers who use terabytes of data and create state-of-the-art Generative AI algorithms to push the boundaries of AI creativity? We are building foundational behavioral models for Amazon Stores using Generative AI, LLMs and Large Model training techniques that fuses general world knowledge, customer shopping behavior and Amazon e-commerce domain knowledge. We are looking for scientists who are passionate about technology, innovation, and customer experience, and are ready to make a lasting impact on the industry using intelligent and transformative AI applications. Working closely with cross-functional teams, you will be an essential part of every stage of AI development, from ideation and design to rigorous testing and successful deployment, ensuring our AI projects drive innovation and provide value for our customers. If you’re fired up about being part of a dynamic, driven team, then this is your moment to join us on this exciting journey! Key job responsibilities In this role you will leverage your background and expertise to lead developing foundational behavioral model for Amazon Stores using Generative AI, LLM and Large Model training techniques. On a day-to-day basis, you will: - Research and implement new algorithms and architectures for generative AI applications. - Optimize model performance and scalability for inference and deployment. - Collaborate with other talented applied scientists and engineers to gather and preprocess large datasets and develop an improved training infrastructure that accelerates innovation. - Experiment with SOTA methods to improve generative AI model quality. - Provide technical expertise and guidance to support the integration of generative AI solutions into various products and services.
US, WA, Seattle
Do you want to join an innovative team of scientists and engineers who use terabytes of data and create state-of-the-art Generative AI algorithms to push the boundaries of AI creativity? We are building foundational behavioral models for Amazon Stores using Generative AI, LLMs and Large Model training techniques that fuses general world knowledge, customer shopping behavior and Amazon e-commerce domain knowledge. We are looking for scientists who are passionate about technology, innovation, and customer experience, and are ready to make a lasting impact on the industry using intelligent and transformative AI applications. Working closely with cross-functional teams, you will be an essential part of every stage of AI development, from ideation and design to rigorous testing and successful deployment, ensuring our AI projects drive innovation and provide value for our customers. If you’re fired up about being part of a dynamic, driven team, then this is your moment to join us on this exciting journey! Key job responsibilities In this role you will leverage your background and expertise to lead developing foundational behavioral model for Amazon Stores using Generative AI, LLM and Large Model training techniques. On a day-to-day basis, you will: - Research and implement new algorithms and architectures for generative AI applications. - Optimize model performance and scalability for inference and deployment. - Collaborate with other talented applied scientists and engineers to gather and preprocess large datasets and develop an improved training infrastructure that accelerates innovation. - Experiment with SOTA methods to improve generative AI model quality. - Provide technical expertise and guidance to support the integration of generative AI solutions into various products and services.
US, MA, Boston
The Alexa Edge AI team is looking for a passionate, talented, and innovative senior applied scientist with a strong background in deep learning and speech processing techniques. You will have an enormous opportunity to impact the customer experience, design, architecture, and implementation of an industry-leading product used every day by people you know. As an Applied Scientist, you will leverage Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to develop novel machine learning algorithms to advance the state of the art in speech and audio processing. Key job responsibilities · Conduct applied research project(s) effectively and know when to ask for help and when to work independently · Engage with an experienced cross-disciplinary staff to conceive and design innovative solutions for consumer products. · Actively participate and contribute to research activities including publications and patents · Work closely with an internal inter-disciplinary team, and outside partners to drive key aspects of product definition, execution and test. · Be proactive, flexible and able to succeed within an open collaborative peer environment
US, CA, Pasadena
We are seeking an Applied Scientist to join the SAF Lab. In this role, you will lead the effort in safe reinforcement learning (RL) including the development of legged locomotion algorithms that internalize safety and are deployable on physical hardware—enabling highly dynamic robots to walk, run, avoid collisions and recover from disturbances with agility and robustness. You will develop RL architectures that interface with physics-based models (for dynamic retargeting and reward shaping), internalize safety constraints in training, sim-to-real transfer and interface with safety filters at run-time. Therefore, your work will sit at the intersection of safety-critical control and learning, and you will collaborate with others in the SAF Lab and Amazon working on perception, planning, whole-body and safety-critical control. This is an opportunity to shape the foundations of safe learning on emerging platforms that will remove bottlenecks to deployment and enable these robots to safely operate around humans. Key job responsibilities • Collaborate with product teams and science leaders to set a science roadmap (with eventual impact on real robots). • Design, train, and deploy reinforcement learning (RL) policies for dynamic legged locomotion including walking, running, stair climbing, and fall recovery on physical robots • Develop sim-to-real transfer pipelines that produce policies robust to the reality gap, including domain randomization, system identification, and adaptive strategies • Integrate control-based methods with RL, as inputs to the RL (dynamic retargeting and control-guided rewards), in training (internalizing safety constraints in training), and as the RL feeds into safety layers and whole-body control • Develop and maintain large-scale training infrastructure for locomotion policy learning, including physics simulation environments, domain randomization and GPU parallelization • Investigate the distillation of locomotion policies, integration with whole-body control, foundation models, VLAs, world models, perception and full-stack autonomy • Evaluate policy performance rigorously through simulation benchmarks, hardware experiments, and failure-mode analysis • Publish research at top-tier robotics and ML venues and contribute to Amazon's scientific reputation in advanced robotics • Collaborate with perception and planning teams to enable terrain-aware and goal-conditioned locomotion behaviors A day in the life Amazon offers a full range of benefits that support you and eligible family members, including domestic partners and their children. Benefits can vary by location, the number of regularly scheduled hours you work, length of employment, and job status such as seasonal or temporary employment. The benefits that generally apply to regular, full-time employees include: 1. Medical, Dental, and Vision Coverage 2. Maternity and Parental Leave Options 3. Paid Time Off (PTO) 4. 401(k) Plan If you are not sure that every qualification on the list above describes you exactly, we'd still love to hear from you! At Amazon, we value people with unique backgrounds, experiences, and skillsets. If you’re passionate about this role and want to make an impact on a global scale, please apply! About the team Work with the inventor of control barrier functions in the Safe Autonomy Frontiers (SAF) Lab. The first industry research lab in safe autonomy, developing a universal safety layer for the next generation of robotic systems: mobile robots, manipulators, mobile manipulators, and future platforms with dynamic stability. You will push the frontiers of performant safety for highly dynamic robots: CBF theory integrated with perception and learning, evaluated on next-generation robots. Your work will underpin robots operating alongside people at Amazon's unprecedented scale.