Susan Hura, PhD is Chief Design Officer at Kore.ai where she manages a team of conversation design and natural language experts. Susan is a passionate advocate for user-centric conversation design and has deep experience in linguistics, user experience, and speech acoustics. She has built multidisciplinary teams in industry and academia and holds a Doctorate in Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin. Susan founded and managed the Center for User Experience at Intervoice, and was a member of the human factors team at Lucent Technologies Bell Labs. As a faculty member at Purdue University, she co-founded a multidisciplinary team researching novel approaches to speech recognition. For fifteen years, she owned SpeechUsability, a consulting firm that optimized conversational experiences for clients in the travel, financial services, automotive, retail, utilities, telecommunications, and healthcare industries. Susan was Program Chair of the SpeechTEK Conference (2007-2016) and founding President of the Association of Conversational Interaction Design (ACIxD.org).