Amazon is giving college kids a chance to win up to 2.5 million with a voice-controlled app

If you're in college and have the chops to build an Alexa-based "socialbot," Amazon wants your help -- so much so that the company's launching a new year-long contest for a chance to tap into a prize pool worth 2.5 million. The contest is called Alexa Prize, named after Amazon's voice-recognition technology, Alexa, which powers a number of voice-controlled devices, including its super popular speaker Echo. The goal of the contest, only open to college students, is to build the best possible conversational app using Alexa that can talk about popular topics and news events without sounding like a machine. The final winner will be announced at AWS re:Invent 2017. "The Alexa Prize challenges students to build socialbots that can acquire knowledge and opinions from the web, and express them in context just as a human would in everyday conversations. This challenge and the immediate feedback students will receive on their best ideas from millions of engaged Alexa customers will make what we previously thought impossible, possible," Rohit Prasad, Amazon Alexa's Vice President and Head Scientist, said in a statement.