Amazon will give you 1M if your AI can chitchat for 20 min

The Tap is similar to Echo, but requires you to press a button to speak to Alexa. SAN FRANCISCO – Amazon is offering 1 million to the university team that builds an artificial intelligence that can keep up its side of the conversation with a human being for 20 minutes. On Thursday Amazon announced the Alexa Prize, a 1 million award for the creation of a conversational artificial intelligence that can talk to people "coherently and engagingly" for a third of an hour. Such a system would be unprecedented "and at least five times more advanced than state-of-the-art conversational AI," said Rohit Prasad, vice president and head scientist of Amazon Alexa. To aid the endeavor, up to ten teams will get a 100,000 stipend from Amazon along with Alexa-enabled devices, free cloud computing and support from Amazon's Alexa team.