"Launched in 2021, the Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge is a competition for university students to develop bots that could assist customers in completing cooking or do-it-yourself home improvement tasks that required multiple steps and decisions. The teams’ goal: build taskbots that assist customers in multi-step tasks, and adapt those instructions based on the resources and tools available to the customer. Customers interacted with one of ten taskbots and rated the interaction—on a scale from 1 to 5—on how helpful that taskbot was with the task."
(Overview summary from Amazon Science on YouTube, the source of the video embedded above)
CMA led the overall production – crew, cinematography, lighting, and direction – while Punch Drunk delivered the technical backbone:
The project evolved from its origins in 2017 into what is now the Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge.
Inside the Alexa Prize
Amazon is in a pitched battle with its rivals to bring truly conversational AI into our homes. So the company is staging a contest—a mad dash toward an outlandish goal: Cook up a bot capable of small talk.
The first interactor—a muscular man in his fifties with a shaved head and a black V-neck sweater—walks into a conference room and sits in a low-slung blue armchair before a phalanx of video cameras and studio lights. He’s brightly lit. The rest of the room is totally dark. He gazes at a black, hockey-puck-shaped object—an Amazon Echo—on a small table in front of him. “Alexa,” he says, “let’s chat.”
Three top performers emerge in inaugural Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge—the first conversational AI challenge to incorporate multimodal (voice and vision) customer experiences.