Amazon Alexa Challenge: Alana

Our social chatbot Alana was one of only 3 finalists in the Amazon Alexa Challenge in both 2017 and 2018!

Originally 15 teams were selected to take part in the 2017 semi-finals, from over 100 entrants. The challenge was to create a socially intelligent chatbot, for release on the Amazon Echo platform. The 15 chatbots were deployed to the US public for a period of 6 weeks, and rated by users on a scale of 1-5. The top-scoring bots made it to the final.

Alana is capable of open-domain social conversation, for example on topics in the news, about music, celebrities, fashion, and sports.

A version of Alana has been integrated with the Pepper robot platform, as part of the MuMMER project.

Faculty advisors: Oliver Lemon and Verena Rieser

Student team: Ioannis Papaioannou (team leader), Amanda Curry, Jose Part, Igor Shalyminov, Yanchao Yu, Xinnuo Xu, Alessandro Suglia