By Drew Meyer.

Originally posted on developer.amazon.com

We’re thrilled to announce the Alexa Skills Challenge: Alexa Conversations with Devpost, an opportunity to invent the future of voice experiences and compete for more than $100K in prizes. Participants will gain firsthand experience using Alexa’s artificial intelligence to create natural Alexa skill experiences with less training data and code. Start building with the Alexa Conversations beta today and submit your challenge entry by September 14. Global contestants are welcome (see contest rules for restrictions) but qualifying skills must be published in the en_US locale.

Making Conversations Feel Natural

Conversations are more nuanced than simply understanding words and sentences. As a result, you need to accommodate a wide range of phrases and unexpected dialog turns and have the memory to sustain long back- and-forth sessions. Your skills need to flex while gathering inputs and accept too much or too little information out of sequence. Skills need to automatically track across topical shifts, reference context, and adjust to corrections. For example, a pizza order is a conversation when customers say: “a medium two-topping” (answering more than one question at once), “how many people does that feed” (context carryover, anaphora, answering with a question), “pepperoni and onion” (list values), “make that a large” (correction), “apply the third coupon” (using voice to select from a visual or vocalized list), and tap choices on a screen. Supporting these conversational patterns make Alexa skills feel more natural and delights customers in new ways.

The Skill-Builder’s Dilemma

Building skills that feel natural with today’s techniques can be cumbersome and error-prone, and developers have told us they are apt to abandon or compromise their efforts. The number of ways customers can engage and the variety of dialog paths they can take often result in a combinatorial explosion of states and code. For example, a pizza ordering skill with seven topping combinations might require more than 5,000 dialog paths. Using slots and intents means hard coding every element, including carrying context through every turn, building a state machine to manage the variables, and accounting for every possible phrase a customer might use. A skill that feels natural can become prohibitively complex to build and maintain, but limiting the skill produces an unnatural interaction that doesn’t fully satisfy customers.

Fill in the Blanks with Artificial Intelligence 

Alexa Conversations uses AI to bridge the gap between what you can build manually and the vast range of possible conversations. You provide a few sample dialogs showing your ideal dialog paths and templates for the APIs you’ll need called, and AI extrapolates the spectrum of phrasing variations and dialog paths for you. The AI will also take on the dialog state and context management, including carrying context across turns, managing lists, and supporting corrections. Alexa Conversations helps customers experience natural conversations with less development effort, freeing you to focus on creating a quality experience instead of on flowcharts.

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