On April 21, 2017, AWS announced a chatbot-building competition that put Amazon Lex and AWS Lambda at its center. Entrants could submit a new bot or an existing project updated to use both services during the submission period, which opened April 19 and closed July 18. [story-s1]
The brief was deliberately practical: create a natural-language bot that solves a problem or adds value for users, then make it available for judging with a demonstration video, written explanation and code or deployment instructions. AWS highlighted possible destinations such as Slack, Facebook Messenger and Twilio SMS, along with optional connections to other AWS services, speech tools and business software. [story-s1]
Judges were to weigh customer value, the bot’s originality and quality, and how well it worked—including whether it recognized and answered common requests. The prize structure mixed cash with AWS credits and, for top entrants, access to re:Invent and a meeting with the Lex team. By tying a competition to a recently launched conversational service, AWS gave developers a concrete reason to move beyond a demo and build something testable. [story-s1]
The entry rules also left room for teams as well as individual builders, while organizations with more than 50 employees could compete only for non-cash recognition. That boundary made the challenge accessible to small teams without treating a large company’s submission as equivalent for the cash awards. [story-s1]
Source documents
- Announcing the AWS Chatbot Challenge – Create Conversational, Intelligent Chatbots using Amazon Lex and AWS Lambda | AWS News Bloghttps://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-the-aws-chatbot-challenge-create-conversational-intelligent-chatbots-using-amazon-lex-and-aws-lambda/