Coming to an Alexa Device Near You: ScottyBot

A simulated robot developed by Carnegie Mellon University students in the School of Computer Science’s Language Technologies Institute (LTI)(opens in new window) has made the final round of Amazon’s Alexa Prize SimBot Challenge(opens in new window). 

ScottyBot is one of five bots selected for the final round of the competition, which challenges teams to develop a bot that best responds to commands and other inputs in a virtual world. Alexa users with Echo Show or Fire TV devices can interact with ScottyBot and the other finalists by saying “Alexa, play with robot.” Ratings and feedback provided by the public will help the team improve their bots ahead of next month's final competition and increase their chances of earning awards totaling $650,000.

This is the inaugural SimBot Challenge, designed to advance the science of embodied artificial intelligence agents that can interact with humans and understand, learn and collaborate on tasks. Through the challenge, students can launch their work online and receive rapid feedback from Alexa users. 

The ScottyBot team has evolved throughout the competition. The current team is led by Assistant Professor Yonatan Bisk(opens in new window) and includes master’s students Jimin Sun, Benny Jiang, Jessica Zhong, Malaika Vijay, Nikhil Gupta, Prasoon Varshney, Sai Vishwas Padigi, Shubham Virmani, Shubham Phal, Vineeth Reddy, Xinyue Chen, Adhokshaja Madhwaraj, Kushagra Mahajan and SoYeon (Tiffany) Min. 

More information about the SimBot Challenge is available on Amazon’s Science blog(opens in new window).