Amazon: Students, we'll give you $2.5m for a chat-up, AI?

Amazon is offering teams of university students the chance to claim their share of a $2.5m prize for developing the best “socialbot” capable of holding a natural language conversation. The Alexa Prize, detailed by Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels on his personal blog, will see university teams slug it out in a …

[Shady]

If I said you had some nice I/O....

Would you buffer my RAM or throw an Exception?

[WibbleMe]

Why would anyone want to waste time talking to an AI, there are plenty of human trolls out there already

[Mage]

Amazon desperation?

I suppose we can hardly expect a Marketing company do be able to develop a decent chat bot.

A decent one is likely worth Billions, if WhatsApp is worth $19B.

[Mage]

XKCD

XKCD on AI Chatbots

Hover mouse.

[allthecoolshortnamesweretaken]

"This is no trivial challenge when actual speech is involved rather than just text exchanges, as with early examples of AI chatbots such as MIT's ELIZA."

And in what sense is "actual speech" not a "text exchange"?

Input by keyboard or input by voice recognition, the important bit is parsing and processing that input. Granted, most people will provide a larger input when they can talk instead of having to type. But let's face it, this increase in size is mostly due to added noise, not added content. So yeah, extra effort needed to, like, filter the, uh, noise, right?

But given the improvement of hardware to run things on I can't shake the feeling that dear old ELIZA would do quite well in a chatbot competition.

[Dr Patrick J R Harkin]

"...university students...capable of holding a...conversation..."

Well, there's your problem.