“Alexa, when will you learn to chat with me like people I might meet at a party or a pub?”

“I couldn’t say.”

Alexa may be a popular talking bot, but she has not yet acquired the “social” skills to turn that query into a conversation.

A team of Emory students from the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science are trying to help her develop those skills sooner, rather than later. They are among eight university teams selected from around the world to create a social bot and compete for this year’s Alexa Prize. Amazon is sponsoring the $3.5 million university challenge in order to advance the conversational capabilities of bots such as Alexa — Amazon’s “personal assistant” software that responds to voice commands through a growing list of devices.

“Conversational AI is one of the most difficult problems in the field of artificial intelligence,” says Zihao Wang, a graduate student and the leader of the Emory team. “Human language is so rich. We use combinations of words to form different expressions and idioms. It’s difficult to represent them in computer language.”

Wang’s teammates include Ali Ahmadvand, Jason Choi, Harshita Sahijwani and Sergey Volokhin — all graduate students — and senior Mingyang Sun. The team’s faculty advisor is Eugene Agichtein, an associate professor of Mathematics and Computer Science.

Each of the university teams received a $250,000 research grant, Alexa-enabled devices, and other tools, data and support from Amazon. A $500,000 prize will be given next November to the team that creates the best social bot, while second- and third-place teams will receive $100,000 and $50,000.

Additionally, a $1 million research grant will be awarded to the winning team’s university if their social bot achieves the grand challenge — conversing coherently and engagingly with humans for 20 minutes with a user rating of 4.0 or higher.

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