A team of Emory University students won Amazon’s 2020 Alexa Prize, a global competition to create the most engaging chatbot to advance the field of artificial intelligence. The team earned $500,000 for taking first place with their chatbot named Emora.
The students designed Emora to provide comfort and warmth to people interacting with Amazon’s voice-activated Alexa-enabled devices, whether they wanted to discuss movies, sports and their pets or their concerns for themselves and their families amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Emory team consisted of 14 students led by graduate student Sarah Fillwock and faculty advisor Jinho Choi, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science. They christened their chatbot Emora because it sounds like a feminine version of “Emory” and is similar to a Hebrew term for a sage skilled in eloquence.
Even as they celebrate their win, the Emory team is looking ahead to how they can apply the concepts they developed to benefit everything from education to people suffering from depression and social isolation.
The annual Alexa Prize, launched in 2016, challenges university students to make breakthroughs in the design of chatbots, or social bots — software apps that simplify interactions between humans and computers by allowing them to talk with one another. Emory used a unique strategy to beat out nine other universities and take the top spot in this year’s competition, the most hotly contested ever.
“Normally people think of a chatbot as being an intelligent assistant, to answer questions or provide a customer service,” Fillwock says. “We designed a more socially oriented chatbot that could actually show interest in an individual user and provide comfort to people if they wanted it.”
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Emory team vies for best social bot via Amazon's Alexa Prize
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