Amazon to spend 2.5M on university competition to build "socialbot"

If you need an Uber, Amazon Alexa has your back. Unfortunately if what you need is a conversation buddy, the personal assistant isn't quite up to the task. In an effort to bolster Alexa's social intelligence, Amazon is putting 2.5 million into a new university competition to design and build "socialbots" for the platform. Engineers will use the Alexa Skills Kit to build the artificial socialites. As part of the competition, the Washington Post, owned by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, will also be making its corpus available to participants as a tool to train the bots.