  Since its inception in 2016, the Alexa Prize program has enabled hundreds of
university students to explore and compete to develop conversational agents
through the SocialBot Grand Challenge. The goal of the challenge is to build
agents capable of conversing coherently and engagingly with humans on popular
topics for 20 minutes, while achieving an average rating of at least 4.0/5.0.
However, as conversational agents attempt to assist users with increasingly
complex tasks, new conversational AI techniques and evaluation platforms are
needed. The Alexa Prize TaskBot challenge, established in 2021, builds on the
success of the SocialBot challenge by introducing the requirements of
interactively assisting humans with real-world Cooking and Do-It-Yourself
tasks, while making use of both voice and visual modalities. This challenge
requires the TaskBots to identify and understand the user's need, identify and
integrate task and domain knowledge into the interaction, and develop new ways
of engaging the user without distracting them from the task at hand, among
other challenges. This paper provides an overview of the TaskBot challenge,
describes the infrastructure support provided to the teams with the CoBot
Toolkit, and summarizes the approaches the participating teams took to overcome
the research challenges. Finally, it analyzes the performance of the competing
TaskBots during the first year of the competition.
