Pixie: A Social Chatbot

We present Pixie, a socialbot submitted to the 2017 Alexa Prize, developed with the objective of holding engaging casual conversations on open-ended topics. We discuss the modular, heterogeneous architecture of the Pixie system, and highlight the successes and shortcomings of our primarily template-based approach. We reflect on our findings about alternative paradigms used in the prototyping phase; in particular, we discuss the challenges of bridging recent breakthroughs in deep learning with the frontier of machine social dialogue.