• by Chase Martin , November 14, 2016

After launching a $2.5 million initiative for university teams to further develop AI-driven conversational bots last month, Amazon just selected the teams it plans to sponsor for the challenge.

Amazon received applications from more than 100 teams at universities across 22 countries.

As a result, Amazon selected 12 teams instead of 10 to receive a $100,000 stipend to develop their AI bots. Most of the teams selected are in the U.S. with others from Canada, the U.K., Italy, and Czech Republic.

The Alexa Prize, which launched last month, is a competition for university teams to develop ‘socialbots’ on Amazon’s Alexa AI platform that can hold a natural conversation with humans. Amazon initially planned to sponsor 10 teams to explore and further develop different areas of conversational artificial intelligence, such as natural language processing and common sense reasoning.

Throughout the course of the next year, the 12 teams will develop their bots and the winning team will win $500,000. Additionally, if the winning team’s bot can ‘converse coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics for 20 minutes,’ Amazon plans to award a $1 million research grant to that team’s university.

“For the Socialbot Challenge, the goal is to build an Alexa skill that will converse with people about trending societal topics and events in a turn-by-turn format,” an Amazon spokesperson told the IoT Daily.

“In order for machines to be truly intelligent, they must be able to participate in conversation, demonstrating an understanding of the world and cultural moments.”

Amazon appears to not have a focus on any potential marketing and advertising implications of conversational AI bots.

“The use cases for socialbots are not for marketing or advertising; instead, the goal is to make Alexa even more engaging and enable students to advance their research in this area,” Amazon told the Daily.

However, some brands have already been using such bots for marketing and advertising purposes.

For example, agency executives discussed using chatbots to engage with consumers on behalf of brands at the MediaPost OMMA Bots and Chat conference during Advertising Week.

In that panel discussion, Natalie Monbiot, senior vice president and managing partner of strategic innovation at UM, said her team created a chatbot last year for a client as part of a broader campaign.

The chatbot was designed to engage with consumers as one of the characters of a new movie and received high engagement rates. On average, consumers engaged with the chatbot for 10 minutes, but some conversations were as long as two and a half hours, according to Monbiot.

Here are the university teams selected for the Alexa Prize challenge:

• Carnegie-Mellon University (two teams)

• Princeton University

• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

• University of California, Berkeley

• University of California, Santa Cruz

• University of Washington

• University of Montreal

• University of Edinburgh

• Heriot-Watt University

• University of Trento

• Czech Technical University, Prague