Dr. Ahmed Bouzid

Ahmed Bouzid, Ph.D. is the Founder and CEO of Witlingo, Columnist at CMS Wire, Angel Investor, and Advisor at HLT Georgetown. He is a Podcaster and Advisor to OpenHome.

In 2016, Ahmed founded and has since been the CEO of Witlingo, a company that builds products and solutions that enable brands to engage with their clients and prospects using voice, audio, and conversational AI.

They are helping Activity Coordinators and Directors in Senior Living Communities leverage the latest cutting communication technology and Generative AI to deliver on their Digital Inclusion mission with the help of key partners Amazon, Genesys, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Twilio.

His key clients include the AARP Foundation, Parker Life, Jersey City Housing Authority, Erickson Senior Living, Volunteers of America, and Springpoint. Watch Large language models and finding value with Witlingo’s Ahmed Bouzid | VUX World.

Listen to the comprehensive interview The Voice of Tomorrow: With Dr. Ahmed Bouzid – Part 1. In this interview, Ahmed talks about the challenges facing voice-first systems like Alexa and Siri. Ahmed explores one of those challenges with a story he calls The Fallacy of the Fish and the Bird that illustrates the temptation to judge a new product using the same metrics that we used for the older ones, even when they don’t make sense. As he put it, “The metrics of the fish don’t apply to the bird, and, also, there are a lot more fish than there are birds.”

Ahmed is the Host of the Humanity 8.0 Podcast, where he is focusing on the large trends that will define humanity’s next iterations.

As an Advisor at OpenHome, a revolutionary LLM-driven smart speaker, Ahmed is helping with their innovative Voice SDK that enables any device to become smart, allowing the users to have natural, seamless conversations with their devices.

Ahmed is the Founder and President of The True Representation Movement, a non-profit organization aimed at building a movement to elect representatives who vote in alignment with the majority of their constituency on every bill.

In the 2024 US Elections, Ahmed was the Campaign Manager at Hensel for Congress. Bentley Hensel is a data-driven problem solver running for Congress in Virginia’s 8th District. His mission is to bring technological innovation and transparency to the federal government with the help of Ahmed’s expertise. Read Democracy Is Broken: Time for Data-Driven Decisions.

Since 2021, Ahmed has been Advising The Human Language Technology Group at Georgetown University, helping students in Linguistics, the Humanities, and the Social Sciences build skills that will help them enter the Human Language Technology workforce.

Before Witlingo, Ahmed was Head of Alexa’s Smart Home Product at Amazon between January 2015 and February 2016. He product-led and worked closely with a team of engineers and marketers to launch Alexa’s Smart Home offering for the Amazon Echo and the Alexa platform in April 2015.

He now advises the advocacy group I Am Alexa Alliance, which is asking Amazon to remove Alexa as a wake word. Read Amazon, can we have our name back? Listen to Dr. Ahmed Bouzid Talks About Working on the Alexa Team, Founding Witlingo and 20 Years of Voice Assistants.

Ahmed earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy of Science and Technology and his Master’s Degree of Science in Computer Science both from Virginia Tech. He earned his Bachelor’s Degree of Science in Computer Science from George Washington University.

In 2003, Ahmed was Speech Scientist at Tell-Eureka, before he joined Angel.com as an App Designer in 2004. He soon became Product Manager in 2005 and Senior Product Manager in 2006. Through 2009 and 2011, he was the Director of Partner Solutions and Product Management, and became Senior Director of Product Management in 2011 and of Product and Innovation in 2012. Finally, at the end of 2012, he became the VP of Production and Innovation and was part of the executive team that successfully closed the sale of Angel.com to Genesys, where he became the VP of Product of all Genesys SaaS Offerings.

In 2013, Ahmed also Cofounded and was the Chief Product Officer at XOWi in McLean, Virginia. The company was focused on delivering a SaaS/Cloud Dialog/Speech development platform for mobile, wearable, and other devices. Read Crowdsourcing Innovation: Ahmed Bouzid, CEO of XOWi Inc.

Ahmed holds 14 patents in the Speech Recognition and Natural Language Processing field and was recognized as a “Speech Luminary” by Speech Technology Magazine and one of the Top 11 Speech Technologists by Voicebot.ai.

He is Open Voice Network Ambassador, Editor at The Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective (SERRC), and author at Opus Research, CMSWire, Business 2 Community, and The Business of Enterprise AI.

Ahmed is the Coauthor of his latest book Generative AI For Executives: A Strategic Roadmap for Your Organization. His published works include The Voicebot Age: Essays on Conversational AI & Digital Audio, The Elements of Voice First Style: A Practical Guide to Voice User Interface Design, The True Representation Model: A Primer, NFTs for Business: A Practical Guide to Harnessing Digital Assets, and The Credo: On The Ills of Concentrated Private Power.

Read What History Teaches Us About Generative AI’s Impact on Humanity and A Future Without Ads: Why It’s Time to Move Beyond Advertising.

Watch and listen to Large language models with Witlingo’s Ahmed Bouzid.

Watch VOICE Global 2021 | Interview with Witlingo’s Ahmed Bouzid, Ahmed Bouzid — Robotomorphism: A Proposal, and VOICE is the future of COMPUTING: Ahmed Bouzid.

Visit his LinkedIn profile and Amazon profile. Follow him on Crunchbase, The Org, and Twitter.