At Google’s annual developer conference in 2016, the search giant unveiled Google Assistant, an AI-powered robot that many compared to Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa. However, Google hopes that Assistant will be far more capable than making reservations and playing your favorite songs on command. Since its launch, the tool has quietly collected data from the millions of users who regularly use it. Through machine learning, the software is capable of training itself to understand the words users are saying and even how the physical world works.

What are some of the biggest challenges with teaching a machine to extract meaning from our everyday voice and text commands? How are neural networks being used to show devices the complexities and limitations of the human language? Google VP and Engineering Fellow Dr. Fernando Pereira, who currently leads projects in natural language understanding, believes the answers to these questions will allow him to further create a virtual assistant equipped with the ability to do anything you ask.

Join us for a conversation with Dr. Fernando Pereira about Google Assistant and his vision for the future of intelligent computing.

Dr. Fernando Pereira joined Google in 2008 after leaving his post as the chair of the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He received a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1982. He has several patents and over 120 research publications on computational linguistics, machine learning, bioinformatics, speech recognition, and logic programming.