In this conversation, Heather Nolis, a principal machine learning engineer at T-Mobile, shares her journey from neuroscience to machine learning. She discusses the challenges of deploying real-time deep learning models for customer support, focusing on supervised learning and the creation of customer intent models. Heather highlights the balance between small and large models, technical hurdles in speech recognition, and the importance of data quality. She also looks ahead to the future of NLP, exploring innovative applications in customer service and beyond.