Skip to Content

Alexa, Talk Some Sense, Will You?

Amazon is offering $2.5 million to fund research aimed at enabling its personal assistant software to hold a 20-minute conversation.
September 29, 2016

Amazon’s voice-controlled computer, Alexa, can be surprisingly useful for simple tasks like checking the weather or listening to a song. But it’s hardly a great conversationalist.

A new $2.5 million prize announced by the e-commerce giant Thursday is meant to help make Alexa a bit chattier. Winning the prize, however, will require a pretty significant leap in machine understanding of language.

Amazon wants researchers to develop apps to make Alexa capable of talking about a range of topics. The company will sponsor a number of research teams with $100,000 each, and will award $500,000 to the best bot of the lot. A further $1 million prize will be given if any team is able to develop a bot that can hold a conversation for 20 minutes. Various datasets will be made available for participants, including the full archive of the Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos.

The Amazon Echo is Alexa's embodiment in the physical world.

It’s an interesting contest, and it comes at a time when significant progress is being made in natural language processing using the latest machine learning techniques such as deep learning. Earlier this week, Google announced an impressive milestone in language translation, with a system that can translate some text just as well as a human can. That’s a huge deal, because translation relies not only on vocabulary but also syntactic understanding, which is a lot harder to encode into a machine.

Still, language remains extremely difficult for machines because of its complexity, ambiguity, and the way it taps into common sense. A recent contest involving ambiguous sentences showed that machines are still a long way from matching a person’s ability to instantly decode that ambiguity.

In other words, don’t expect Alexa to talk your ear off anytime soon.

(Read more: “Google’s New Service Translates Languages Almost As Well As Humans Can,” “AI’s Language Problem,” “A Tougher Turing Test Exposes Chatbots’ Stupidity”)

Keep Reading

Most Popular

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.

How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language

For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.

Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death

Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.