Sumedha Kshirsagar

Sumedha Kshirsagar has a diverse range of work experience in the field of voice user experience (VUI) and product management. Sumedha is currently working as a Product Manager at Raptor Maps, a solar software company. Prior to this, they worked at Apple as a Product Manager for AI/ML, where they led a team and was responsible for defining and implementing metrics to measure the quality of user experience for Siri conversational interactions. Sumedha also contributed to the product roadmap for Siri as part of the product strategy and user research team.

Before Apple, Sumedha worked at Facebook Reality Labs as a Principal Voice User Experience Architect and Researcher. In this role, they led research initiatives for multimodal probabilistic inputs and interactions for virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) applications. Sumedha also contributed to roadmap planning for research and incubation initiatives.

Sumedha has also held various roles at Amazon, including Senior Manager for Voice UX Design in the Alexa Experience team, Principal User Experience Designer for Speech at Amazon/Alexa, and Senior User Experience Designer for Speech at Amazon/Alexa. In these roles, they managed teams, provided strategic guidance, and led the vision for speech and language interfaces for Alexa across multiple devices and services. Sumedha also evangelized voice UX principles and best practices to other teams within Amazon.

Prior to Amazon, Sumedha worked at Nuance Communications as a Principal VUI Designer and Senior VUI Designer, and at Electronic Arts as a Software Engineer. Sumedha also gained research experience as a Research Assistant at MIRALab, University of Geneva, where they conducted PhD research on virtual humans animation and interactive virtual worlds.

Overall, Sumedha Kshirsagar has extensive experience in product management, voice user experience design, and research in the technology industry.

Sumedha Kshirsagar completed a Bachelor of Engineering (BE) degree in Instrumentation and Control from COEP Technological University in 1996. Afterwards, they pursued a Master of Technology (MTech) in Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay from 1996 to 1998. Subsequently, they obtained a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in Computer Animation from the University of Geneva, completing their education in 2003. In 2019, Sumedha Kshirsagar also earned a Certificate in Editing from the University of Washington.