1.    Participation: 

• The contest is open to students who are currently enrolled in high school or in an accredited university or college. Undergraduate and graduate students are eligible.

• A faculty advisor who can verify that the team members are students must be listed on the entry form.

• Students may form teams of five or fewer members.

• Any one student can participate in at most two (2) entries.

2.    About the application:

• The application must use speech recognition or typed natural language understanding. It may also support other modes and media. Multimodal mobile applications are especially encouraged.

• The application must be operable in English, although other languages may be included.

• The application must be accessible by the contest judges, either on a web page, by downloading and installing or through a smart speaker. 

• If the application needs to be installed (for example if it’s an app), it must be packaged so that it can be installed by contest judges as an installable file such as an .apk file. The application must run on a commonly available hardware/software platform accessible by telephone, URL, smartphone (Android or iPhone), or smart speaker. The application must be ready to run. Submissions that are provided only as source code will not be accepted.

• The application must be non-confidential, and non-proprietary.

• Submissions may not contain advertisements, commercial endorsements, or any material that is indecent, obscene, hateful, discriminatory, defamatory, slanderous, libelous, unlawful or otherwise inappropriate as determined by AVIOS in its absolute discretion. Any inappropriate Submissions or material may be disqualified by AVIOS in its sole discretion.

• The application content must not be illegal, offensive or in poor taste, as determined by the contest judges.

• All work must be original.

• The application must not have been submitted to another contest.

• The work must have been done in 2019.

• As soon as the application is submitted, it will receive a preliminary review to ensure that it meets these criteria. For that reason an early submission is to your advantage.

3.    Application website:
Each contest entry must include a URL to the application’s website.  The website must describe the purpose of the application and include:

• Instructions for installing the application if it must be installed by contest judges

• Instructions for accessing and using the application

• Any credentials such as user ids or passwords needed to access the application

• Any limitations that users need to be aware of

• Additional information such as a description of the technologies used, evaluations, or user comments is optional

 Applications without a website cannot be judged. 

4.    Accessing the application: 

• Teams must arrange for hosting their contest applications for testing and evaluation by the contest judges after submission, until February 2020, and for general public use from March 2020 through April 2020.

5.    Judges and judging: 

• Judges will be speech application experts from AVIOS. Judges will use the following criteria: robustness, usefulness, technical superiority, user friendliness, innovation, and creativity. The judges’ decision is final. All contest winners must supply personal identification before collecting prize money.

6.    Important dates:

• The contest entry must be submitted for judging by December 6, 2019 using the submission form at the link below.

• Winners will be notified by January 10, 2020.

• Winners will be publicly recognized on February 10, 2020, at the Conversational Interaction Conference in San Jose, CA.

7.    After the contest: 

• The winning team will receive $500 toward travel expenses to attend the Conversational Interactions conference, free conference registration, and a chance to present their work at the conference.

• The day after the conference (February 12) winners will be able to take a tour of a local Silicon Valley tech company (to be announced).

• Winning entries and other submitted applications selected by the judges may be posted on the AVIOS Web site to inspire other speech and multimodal application developers. AVIOS may use the application resources (such as audio and visual materials) for promotional purposes in future years.

8.    Conditions: 

• By submitting an entry, contestants verify that the submitted application is their own original work and agree that AVIOS is not liable for any copyright or intellectual property claims. Contestants may need to obtain permission from their platform vendor before commercializing the submitted application or any of its derivatives.

9.    Questions?

Please send questions to Peggie Johnson at peggie@avios.org

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Click here for entry form

 

Critical dates:

Application submitted by December 6, 2019

Winners notified by January 10, 2020

Winners announced February 10, 2020 at the Conversational Interactions Conference