Student Team Wins Amazon Alexa Artificial Intelligence Challenge
ucdavis.edu
ucdavis.edu
I wonder if a team heavy on industry experience would have been selected compete.
Also, I wonder what Amazon gains from this? My cynical hat wants to think Amazon would have made the competitors sight over IP rights etc, but I haven’t looked in to the conditions of the completion so I’m spectacularly.
Does anyone know how this is likely to pan out for the students, and not only those who won? Each team was given US$250,000, so it’s sort of paid work?
I don’t particularly have a problem with a company fielding skills in that way, just pondering.
1. https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/9f406f35-c997-...
I would like to know this too. I think that since it is an academic competition, by default everything is open source and the method must be fully outlined in the system description paper, so I don't think IP would be an issue.
> Some of the distinguishing features of the bot included incorporating language disfluencies — pauses such as “hm” or “ah.”
Note that Google recently faced backlash over this very feature demoed in their Virtual Assistant. I'm guessing that public sentiment won't last long, it's a natural part of human language and it feels funny when it's missing.
Disfluencies and breath sounds are peculiar when they're missing from human speech, so not injecting them into AI speech would be an easy design choice to distinguish a speaker as artificial, perfect for Virtual Assistants. For theatrical functions, in video games and movies, it makes sense to add as many human vocal quirks as possible, even the occasional resonance obstructions to simulate colds or a whistle for gap teeth.
For 99,9% of the people who have an issue with such things it's not about "oh, it's hiding very well as a human and could take over, I distrust AI more due to it".
It's about the uncanny valley problem of our brain being pattern matcher, and having difficulties classifying the AI using these new features as the "human pattern" or the "AI pattern" and so we don't like it / feel weirded out by it. Give it a few years and suddenly it has become part of the AI pattern and all is well.
I'm not saying distrust toward AI is growing or not growing, but that it doesn't even play at all in the public reaction to such AI features.
I understand the uncanny valley as a product of a pattern matching exercise that humans developed well before we encountered AI. A part of our "friend or foe", "like me or unlike me" mechanism. If a user considers the tool a "potential foe" (for instance, a customer service resolution bot) every shallow attempt by the tool to approximate "friend" could further alienating the user. I don't think the "weird feeling" just goes away at that point.
I'm also pretty sure that we're going to be in the uncanny valley for long enough to make use of that "weird feeling" for effect outside of fiction.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/dex-microsites-prod/alexaprize/2018...
> Gunrock: Building A Human-Like Social Bot By Leveraging Large Scale Real User Data
Abstract:
> Gunrock is a social bot designed to engage users in open domain conversations. We improved our bot iteratively using large scale user interaction data to be more capable and human-like. Our system engaged in over 40, 000 conversations during the semi-finals period of the 2018 Alexa Prize. We developed a context-aware hierarchical dialog manager to handle a wide variety of user behaviors, such as topic switching and question answering. In addition, we designed a robust threestep natural language understanding module, which includes techniques such as sentence segmentation and automatic speech recognition (ASR) error correction. Furthermore, we improve the human-likeness of the system by adding prosodic speech synthesis. As a result of our many contributions and large scale user interactions analysis, we achieved an average score of 3.62 on a 1 − 5 Likert scale on Oct 14th. Additionally, we achieved an average of 22.14 number of turns and a 5.22 minutes conversation duration.
The teams site http://alquistai.com