Team Alquist from CIIRC CTU competes for gold again this year with its Social Bot

Amazon selected 5 university teams for the final round, based on both evaluations of individual anonymized interactions from users of Alexa-enabled devices and technical papers written by each team.

The selected finalists are:

Let's briefly recapitulate the course of the competition, in which our student team is participating for the fifth time. Already at the end of 2022, the team consisting of Ondřej Kobza, Petr Marek, Jan Čuhel, David Herel and Tommaso Gargiani (all students of CTU - FEL) was selected among nine teams that will try to complete the so-called "Grand Challenge". This means getting a score of 4.0 or higher (out of 5 possible) from the jury and sustaining a 20-minute continuous and engaging socialbot-to-human conversation. No one has yet met this challenge. The team that succeeds will receive a $1 million grant for their university.

This year, users can invoke one of the competition bots on their Alexa-equipped devices with the formula "Alexa, let's discuss". Unlike in previous years, this also applies to devices with a screen (Amazon Echo or Fire TV), and conversational users are thus enriched with visual enjoyment. The feedback that users provide to the teams in the form of a rating of the ongoing conversation with the socialbot allows student teams to improve their bots.

Not only the experience from the previous years, but also the right technical solution ensured our team's advancement to the semi-finals in May and now to the final, which will take place in the first week of August and which will determine the winner.  The team has participated in the competition since its inception and has always stood on the podium. Apart from last year's first place, it has been silver twice and bronze once.

"We are thrilled that the Alquist team from CIIRC CTU has reached the finals of the prestigious Alexa Prize competition. At this exciting stage of the competition, Alquist is grateful for the support and partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), whose advanced infrastructure enables the deployment of our hybrid conversational technology combining advanced language and scripting models. As we advance to the finals, the team will strive to use this opportunity to further enhance Alquist, push the boundaries of conversational AI and set new standards for human-like interactions," comments Jan Šedivý on the team's progress, in his role as the team's university advisor.

"Thanks to Chat  GPT, everyone is familiar with the big language models. The team from CTU CIIRC has been working on conversational artificial intelligence for many years and every year it manages to be among the best teams in the competition of prestigious universities. This field is developing very dynamically and I am pleased that thanks to the Alquist team we are among the most innovative in the field," says Ondřej Velek, Director of CIIRC CTU, and adds: "I am keeping my fingers crossed for this year's finals, when the Alquist team is in the difficult position of defending last year's victory."

News in this year's competition

This year, Amazon has decided to make the competition a little bit more varied by enlivening conversations that were previously only verbal conversations - with multimodal elements such as images or text.

In addition, this year there will even be two awards: as in the past, there is a prize for overall performance in social interaction (with a prize money of $250,000 for the first-place team, $50,000 for the second-place team and $25,000 for the third-place team), but now there will be an award for scientific contribution (again with $250,000 for the first-place team, $50,000 for the second-place team and $25,000 for the third-place team).