Building Next-Generation AI Assistants for Wearables

Abstract

How do you build AI assistants that are fast, conversational, and accurate on wearables? This talk shares real-world lessons from shipping large-scale assistants, covering latency, multimodality, on-device tradeoffs, and production-ready architectures.

Bio

Surya Appini is a Senior Staff Engineer, Technical Lead, and Architect at Meta with 12+ years of experience building large-scale consumer products and 7+ years specializing in conversational AI and intelligent assistants. He leads core architecture for AI assistants on Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, the best-selling product in its category, used by millions globally. Previously, he worked on Microsoft Teams, building real-time communication systems. Surya holds a Bachelors degree with Honors in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Madras and a Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Washington. Outside work, he is a sports enthusiast who plays cricket and badminton and is a big fan of thriller movies.