Hicham Tahiri is the founder and CEO of Smartly.ai. While Hicham started as an embedded systems engineer, he began his job as a voice user interface designer way back in 2006 and has spent most of his career focused on voice technology. He later founded what became Smartly in 2011 to help companies building robots and cars integrate speech recognition and interaction into their solutions. When Amazon Echo was launched along with the Alexa Skills Kit in 2015, Smartly began creating Alexa skills and built one of the first third-party voice app design solutions.

Smartly.ai is headquartered in Paris and its software is used by over a thousand developers worldwide. The solution is designed to enable voice app development without the need for technical expertise and as a toolset for skilled developers to build more efficiently.