Ahmed Bouzid is founder and CEO of Witlingo, a company that helps brands, non-profits and other organizations ranging from The Motley Fool and Berlitz to AARP and a successful Virginia Gubernatorial candidate create voice enabled apps. Ahmed has more than 20 years experience working in speech technology. He worked on the early version of Alexa while at Amazon, was a product leader at Angel.com and even built a natural language voice assistant in the 1990’s. He has a Masters Degree in computer science, a PhD from Virginia Tech, is the founder of the Ubiquitous Voice Society association and is a lecturer at Weber State University. 

In this week's episode, we talk about voice assistant development in the 1990's, the creation of voice interaction authoring tools for non-developers, the idea behind web pages for voice, what it was like working on the Amazon Alexa team and his first two years of work at Witlingo. We even spend some time assessing the leading voice assistant platform strengths and weaknesses and touch on the importance of the Gutenberg parenthesis. It's the longest Voicebot Podcast episode yet, but its packed with history and insight. Enjoy.