Amazon Alexa Prize offers 2.5M to get voice assistant chatting

Amazon is hoping some universities start getting chatty with Alexa. The online retailer announced on Thursday the Alexa Prize, a 2.5 million award for college students who develop technology to make it more natural to talk with Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant. The company said the goal of the competition is to build a "socialbot" on Alexa that will converse with people about popular topics and news events. The university team with the best performing socialbot will win a 500,000 prize. Amazon also will give 1 million to the winning team's university if its socialbot is able to talk "coherently and engagingly" with humans for 20 minutes.