Amazon Funds 12 University Teams to Make Alexa More Social

IOT Daily – In yesterday’s article, we mentioned that Amazon was turning to universities for help to make Alexa more social with the Alexa Prize. The original scope of the initiative was to offer $2.5 million in funding to ten university teams to develop Alexa bots that could engage in a twenty minute conversation on various topics. In just over a month, the company received over 100 applications from universities in over 22 countries. This level of interest led the company to select a dozen teams instead of the ten it originally planned. The winning team will receive a $500,000 prize and Amazon will award a $1 million research grant to the team’s university. LINK