GOTO Amazon Chatbot Challenge

Chatbot
GOTO 2017

Bots can help your team be more productive and accomplish more tasks. They can help you increase visibility into your operations or help your customers easily get information through a natural, conversational interface.

Today with Amazon Lex and AWS Lambda building a bot has never been quicker and easier. You can build chatbots with sophisticated natural language processing and almost no operational overhead.

Start building your bot today. Enter the GOTO AWS Chatbot Competition for a chance to win an Amazon Echo or Amazon Dots. See our sample bot for how to get started.

Start challenge

Description

Chatbots are changing how companies interface with their customers. With chatbots, you can easily fulfill the needs of your customers in an automated way using natural, human-like chat interfaces.

However, building and running chatbots is a difficult task. First, most developers lack the deep learning expertise necessary to create bots that can intelligently interpret and respond to text. In addition, developers must also provision, manage, and scale the compute resources necessary to run the bot’s code.

For this challenge, the bot should be able to help you navigate the GOTO Conference. You can view it as your personal conference assistant. A couple of example scenarios you might want to tackle:

  • Find out about the conference schedule, and where the next talk is.
  • Information about speakers and their topics
  • Useful information on how to navigate the conference layout
  • etc.

In order to help you get started we've already built a sample bot for you, that you can download from here

Amazon Lex is a fully managed service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. Lex is powered by the same deep learning technologies that power Amazon Alexa and lets you build natural language chatbots. Lex is integrated with AWS Lambda, a service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. Lambda enables you to write and run logic for your chatbot using serverless compute. Getting started with Amazon Lex and AWS Lambda is quick and easy.

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Show us you can iterate over the sample bot and that you have a solution to the scenario at hand that the conference participant thinks that a real person actually replied to them!

Feel challenged? If you want to try the next level of the challenge, go ahead and register for the AWS Chatbot Challenge, and get the chance to win even bigger prizes!

Rules

Common terms

These are the official rules that govern how the GOTO Amazon Coding Challenge will operate (“Contest”).

Dates and Timing

  • Submission period: June 13, 2017 (10:00 AM CET) - July 2, 2017 (11:59 PM CET)
  • Judging period: July 3, 2017 (10:00 AM CET) - July 7, 2017 (5:00 PM CET)
  • Announcing winners: July 10, 2017

Eligibility

The chatbot challenge is open to:
  • Individuals who are at least the age of majority where they reside as of the time of entry;
  • Individuals who are NOT an employee of Amazon or an employee of an Amazon subsidiary;
  • Individuals NOT involved in any part of the administration and execution of this Contest;
This Contest is void in areas prohibited by law.

Submission

  • Submit your solution using the form at the bottom of this page. You are allowed to submit multiple bots.
  • Sign up for developer accounts on Amazon Web Services (“AWS”). You can get started with AWS for free. The AWS Free Tier includes services with a free tier available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date, as well as additional service offers that do not automatically expire at the end of your 12 month AWS Free Tier term.
  • Enter your bot during the Submission Period:
    • Include a link to your bot code on GitHub.
    • Include all deployment files and testing instructions needed for testing your bot.
    • Include a testing endpoint for your bot.
    • Complete all the required fields on the enter submission page.
    • A video demo of the bot is welcomed but not required.

Winners and judging criteria

At the close of the challenge period a panel of Amazon Web Services judges will review all entries and select one Big Prize winner and 2 First Place winners based on the following judging criteria:
  • Customer Value(35%):The extent to which the bot answers the original challenge.
  • Quality of Idea(35%):Creativity and originality of the bot idea. Is your bot differentiated or does it solve your users' problems in a unique way?
  • Implementation of Idea(30%):How well the bot idea was executed by the developer. Is the bot technically sound and does it function as intended?
Submission Review:Judges are not required to test the Application and may choose to judge based solely on the text description, code and video provided in the Submission.

Prizes

  • Winner: Amazon Echo
  • 2 x First prize winners: Amazon Echo Dot

FAQ

Email aws-goto-challenge@amazon.com for any challenge related questions. If you have questions specific to any Amazon Web Service you might use (Lambda, Lex etc.), please visit the Amazon Developer Forums.

To be eligible for prizes, participants must build and submit a bot that runs on AWS. App submissions must:

  • Be a working bot.
We also recommend that your submission:
  • Integrates other AWS Services.
  • Showcase natural language processing of conversations. You can use Amazon Lex for this.

Yes, you can use an existing bot. Your bot is eligible as long as it is a working bot that runs on AWS.

Yes. Please see our sample bot code in GitHub.

You can get started with AWS for free. The AWS Free Tier includes services with a free tier available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date, as well as additional service offers that do not automatically expire at the end of your 12 month AWS Free Tier term.

Yes. There is no limit to how many times an eligible individual may enter. However, if you submit two or more solutions that are identical or substantially similar, we reserve the right to disqualify all the submissions or require you to choose one submission to enter into the competition.

Yes. By submitting a solution to the challenge, you do not transfer any intellectual property rights to Amazon. Amazon will have the right to feature all solutions entered in the competition for promotional purposes.

Submit solution

If you have any questions, contact us: aws-goto-challenge@amazon.com