Over the last few years, Google Inc. has become one of the top players in artificial intelligence research, with promising results from high-profile projects like AlphaGo and Magenta. Now, the search engine giant has announced that it will be expanding its AI focus to Canada with the creation of a new AI and deep learning research group in Montreal.

The group will be connected to the Google Brain team at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Google also said that it will also give a $4.5 million CAD ($3.375 million USD) grant to the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms.

According to Google, MILA’s new grant will go toward funding seven AI research faculty members at the University of Montreal and McGill University, including such well-known AI researchers as Yoshua Bengio, Pascal Vincent, Aaron Courville, Christopher Pal, Doina Precup, Joelle Pineau, Simon Lacoste-Julien and Laurent Charlin.

It appears that one of the grant’s primary goals will be furthering research on both natural language processing and speech synthesis, especially for non-English languages. Shibl Mourad, head of engineering at Google Montreal, wrote in a blog post that the grant “will help tackle some of the biggest challenges in machine learning and AI, including applications in the realm of systems that can understand and generate natural language.”

Speech recognition and speech synthesis are some of the hottest topics in AI research today, and companies such as Chinese web giant Baidu Inc. have been promising a world where we talk to our computers as naturally as we would talk to another person. Google already has a few of its own projects in this field, such as DeepMind’s WaveNet, which uses neural networks to improve computer speech synthesis, allowing machines to speak without sounding like robots—mostly. Google also has its humorously named Parsey McParseface, a language parsing tool offered as part of the open source machine intelligence repository TensorFlow.

Google likely has dozens of potential uses for this kind of technology, but one of the most obvious is for Google Assistant, the company’s new Android virtual assistant that is currently only available on its newly launched Pixel smartphones. Like Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana, Google Assistant is aimed at allowing users to accomplish various tasks with their phones simply by speaking. But Google Assistant is powered by the company’s own advancements in machine learning and natural language processing.

Thanks to that machine learning, Google Assistant will also continue to get smarter and smarter the more it is used, and Google’s new Montreal lab and research grant could help create a world where we don’t have to yell at our phone until it understands us.

Photo by Taxiarchos228 – Own work, CC BY 3.0, Link