[1] Hakkani-Tür is a 1994 graduate of Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey.
She continued her studies at Bilkent University, also in Ankara, where she earned a master's degree in 1996 and completed her Ph.D. in 2000.
While working for Amazon Alexa, she also taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a distinguished visiting instructor.
[3] She was editor-in-chief of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing from 2019 to 2021,[1] and is president of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue of the Association for Computational Linguistics for the 2023–2025 term.
[4] In 2014, Hakkani-Tür was elected as an IEEE Fellow "for contributions to spoken language processing",[5] and as a Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association "for contributions to advancing the state-of-the-art in spoken language processing, especially for human/human and human/machine conversational understanding".