Vittorio Perera

I am currently a Lead Member of Technical Staff at Salesforce, working on integrating Tenyx’s voice agent technology into the Salesforce stack to power conversational intelligence for AgentForce. I joined Salesforce via the acquisition of Tenyx where I was one of the founding engineers. At Tenyx, I focused on the full spectrum of NLP challenges—from natural language understanding to generation and synthetic data creation—pursuing the ambitious goal of building advanced voice-based AI agents.

Previously, I was part of the Alexa Conversations group at Amazon Lab126 as an applied scientist, where I focused on controllable—both semantically and stylistically—natural language generation (NLG) at scale.

I earned my Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University under Prof. Manuela Veloso. My research explored bidirectional human-robot interaction—developing methods for robots to understand human instructions and questions, and to provide explanations about their actions at the appropriate level of detail.

Before CMU, I completed an M.S. in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and a B.S. in Computer Engineering at Sapienza University in Rome.

In my spare time, I like going to the gym and am an avid (but slow) cyclist. In 2024 I had a taste of bicycle touring riding RAGBRAI and I enjoy planning future trips I hope to take soon.

news

Jul 09, 2025	Pardon the dust! I’m currently moving the website from Bluehost to GitHub Pages and taking the opportunity to give it a little makeover. Over the next few days, some pages may still show content from the original template—thanks for your patience!
Oct 01, 2024	It’s official — Tenyx has been acquired by Salesforce! I’m incredibly excited about this milestone and what it means for our future. I’m looking forward to building voice agents with the power and scale of a company like Salesforce behind us!
May 27, 2024	Attending Contact Center Week in Las Vegas? Come find me at the Tenyx booth! I’ll be there all week—ask me about the voice agents we’re building. I’d love to chat!

selected publications

INLG

Schema-Guided Natural Language Generation

Yuheng Du, Shereen Oraby, Vittorio Perera, and 5 more authors

In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Natural Language Generation, 2020

Bib

@inproceedings{du-etal-2020-schema,
  title = {Schema-Guided Natural Language Generation},
  author = {Du, Yuheng and Oraby, Shereen and Perera, Vittorio and Shen, Minmin and Narayan-Chen, Anjali and Chung, Tagyoung and Venkatesh, Anushree and Hakkani-Tur, Dilek},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Natural Language Generation},
  year = {2020},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
}

AAAI

Multi-Task Learning for Parsing the Alexa Meaning Representation Language

Vittorio Perera, Tagyoung Chung, Thomas Kollar, and 1 more author

In Proceedings of the Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (AAAI-18), 2018

Bib

@inproceedings{perera2018multi,
  title = {Multi-Task Learning for Parsing the Alexa Meaning Representation Language},
  author = {Perera, Vittorio and Chung, Tagyoung and Kollar, Thomas and Strubell, Emma},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Thirty-Second {AAAI} Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (AAAI-18)},
  year = {2018},
  publisher = {{AAAI} Press},
}

Robotics

Learning Task Knowledge from Dialog and Web Access

Vittorio Perera, Robin Soetens, Thomas Kollar, and 5 more authors

Robotics, 2015

Bib

@article{perera2015learning,
  title = {Learning Task Knowledge from Dialog and Web Access},
  author = {Perera, Vittorio and Soetens, Robin and Kollar, Thomas and Samadi, Mehdi and Sun, Yichao and Nardi, Daniele and van de Molengraft, Ren{\'e} and Veloso, Manuela},
  journal = {Robotics},
  year = {2015},
  publisher = {Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute},
}