Gladia: The Future of Speech Transcription with Innovative API

Gladia, a French startup offering an innovative programming interface (API) for speech transcription, recently raised $16 million in a Series A funding round. The company stands out with outstanding accuracy and short processing times, converting audio content precisely into text. In a market where giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have similar APIs in their portfolios but cannot match the performance of specialized startups, Gladia has made its mark. The impressive development in the field of speech models has become particularly evident following the release of OpenAI's Whisper. Gladia competes with other well-funded players such as AssemblyAI, Deepgram, and Speechmatics. Gladia offers a refined version of the Whisper model, which includes the capability for automatic speaker separation, among other features. This function enables the analysis and transcription of conversations by recognizing speaker changes. With support for 100 languages and numerous accents, the startup has proven its practicality, even under demanding conditions. Gladia's API is currently used by over 600 companies, including meeting documentation services and note-taking assistants like Attention, Circleback, Method Financial, Recall, Sana, and Veed.io. Thanks to the new funding, Gladia plans to further optimize the workflow for users by integrating audio intelligence and tasks based on large language models into a single API call. Another central issue Gladia intends to address is latency. Real-time processing requires extremely low latency to enable near-human conversations. Gladia can currently transcribe live conversations with a latency of less than 300 milliseconds. The goal is to combine the high quality of batch processing with real-time capabilities. This potential could provide valuable contributions, especially in call centers, by making relevant information available in real-time. Gladia's API is compatible with all common technology stacks and protocols, including SIP, VoIP, FreeSwitch, and Asterisk. The funding round is led by XAnge, supported by investors such as Illuminate Financial, XTX Ventures, Athletico Ventures, Gaingels, Mana Ventures, Motier Ventures, Roosh Ventures, and Soma Capital. Gladia is convinced that we are at a pivotal point for audio applications. The integration of transcription models into operating systems like iOS and Android could bring the benefits of automated transcription closer to consumers and provide developers with incentives to expand their products with audio features.