A next-generation AI assistant created by students from the University of Glasgow has won an international competition.

The GRILL team (grilllab.ai) from the School of Computing Science took first place in Amazon’s Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge, beating out nine leading research teams worldwide.

Launched in June 2021, the competition challenges university students to develop conversational agents that assist people in completing cooking and do-it-yourself home improvement tasks that require multiple steps and complex decisions.

In May last year, the GRILL team was selected as one of ten entrants to participate in the challenge, receiving a research grant of $250,000 (£176,500) to support 12 months of work. They also received four Amazon Alexa devices, free access to Amazon Web Services, and support from members of the Amazon Alexa team.

The team’s goal was to build taskbots that assist customers in multi-step tasks, such as baking a birthday cake or fixing a scratch on a car — and adapt those instructions based on the resources and tools available to the customer.

If, for example, a customer ran out of an ingredient halfway through a recipe or didn’t have a specific tool for a DIY project, the taskbot had to adjust the plan and suggest possible solutions.

In addition, the TaskBot Challenge is the first conversational AI challenge to incorporate multimodal customer experiences; in addition to receiving verbal instructions, customers are presented with images or videos to guide them through the task.

Customers interacted with the taskbots by saying, ‘Alexa, let’s work together’. That prompt initiated an interaction with one of the taskbots. After the interaction ended, customers rated — on a scale from 1 to 5 — how helpful that taskbot was with the task.

Success required the teams to address many complex AI challenges, from knowledge representation and inference, and common-sense and causal reasoning, to language understanding and generation, requiring the fusion of multiple AI techniques.

The team, consisting of PhD students Sophie Fischer, Carlos Gemmell, Iain Mackie, Paul Owoicho and Federico Rossetto, won a cash prize of $500,000 (£414,000).

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Rossetto said: “The experience of taking the ambitious Alexa Prize TaskBot goals from ideas and research to prototype and launching on a tight timeline was thrilling and humbling.”

Mackie said the team realised it was essential to provide a wide variety of images and videos that help illustrate the techniques involved in each task.

“We learned that users learn and enjoy a task more when there are rich image and video elements,” he said. To do that, the students relied on image and video augmentations, applying multimedia elements that could be reusable across different tasks.

Gemmell, GRILLBot’s project leader, added: “Ultimately, the goal of taskbots is one shared by the research vision from our research lab: to enable people to understand the world and make people’s lives better.”

The team said: “We find it exciting because realising the vision requires fundamental advances in core research areas of machine intelligence. Ultimately, the goal of taskbots is one shared by the research vision from our research lab, to enable people to understand the world and make people’s lives better.”

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