Every year, I look forward to our annual Nuance Research Conference (NRC), an opportunity for our global research organization to come together to collaborate, converse, and drive forward Nuance's vision for designing and building intelligent, conversational solutions. This year, Deep Learning and AI took center stage along with sessions focused on advancing innovation in ASR, TTS, speech signal enhancement, and language innovation (to name a few), and our discussions have primarily centered around how we at Nuance can continue to pioneer advancements that improve the dialogue between people and technology. We were fortunate to kick off the NRC with a presentation given by John Searle, a thought leader in theories of the mind and distinguished professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Prof. Searle is well known for his work on speech acts, the "Chinese room" thought experiment, and, as we found out during the course of his talk, a passionate user of Dragon dictation. Searle spoke extensively about AI and the associated problems of consciousness, arguing that a state of consciousness that is inclusive of all the feelings and sentience of a being is a prerequisite of true intelligence. So, till we find it how consciousness originates in the brain we won't be able to reproduce it in machines, and we can't claim today's AI systems to be accurate models of the human brain.