News details

  • NOVA LINCS’s TWIZ team earn first place in the Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 2
  • Oct 2023
  • The TWIZ team supervised by João Magalhães, NOVA LINCS researcher from Multimodal Systems Group and Professor at the Department of Computer Science at NOVA School of Science and Technology | FCT NOVA, has earned first place in the Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge competition. The team members include Rafael Ferreira (team leader), Diogo Silva, Diogo Tavares, João Bordalo, Inês Simões, Rodrigo Valério, and is supervised by Prof. João Magalhães and Prof. David Semedo.

    “User dialogues in the Alexa TaskBot are unique, shedding a new light into the execution of manual tasks,” said Rafael Ferreira, the TWIZ team lead. “Leveraged by these dialogues, we learned that using TWIZ allowed us to steer conversations in a more contextual and insightful way.”

    This year’s challenge was expanded to include more hobbies and at-home activities. Teams were asked to find interesting ways to incorporate visual aids into every conversation turn when a screen is available. Innovative ideas on improving the presentation of visual aids, as well as the coordination of visual and verbal modalities, were part of the judging criteria.

    “I’m extremely happy about the team’s creativity in designing the groundbreaking TWIZ LLM,” said João Magalhães. "Conversations about video content take CX to an all-new level and I’m very proud for helping to pioneer video dialogue in the Alexa Prize”.

    More details here.