Gladia turns any audio into text in near real time
Meet Gladia, a French AI startup that wants to change how companies interact with audio data. The company develops an audio transcription application programming interface (API) that you can integrate with other products and is supposed to work much better than what’s available out there. And this tech foundation unlocks new use cases around audio.
If you’re familiar with audio transcription APIs, you know that big cloud providers already have their own APIs.
There’s Google’s speech-to-text API, Amazon Transcribe, Microsoft’s Speech to Text, etc. They work well, but they are expensive, slow and don’t have a ton of features.
Gladia’s co-founder and CEO Jean-Louis Quéguiner, who was the former head of AI for OVHcloud and co-founded the company with Jonathan Soto, told me about some of the limitations with existing APIs. According to him, there are three pain points with existing products. First, when it comes to prices, transcribing an hour of audio generally costs $1.50 to $2 an hour.
Second, the output isn’t always very reliable as some languages work well while others are barely supported. When it comes to advanced features, if people speak in multiple languages, chances are the API simply won’t be able to notice the language change and transcribe the audio in more than one language.
Third, transcription APIs are slow.
It can take more than 15 minutes to transcribe an hour of audio.
That’s fine if you don’t need transcriptions right away, but it means that you won’t be able to use these APIs in some industries.
Whisper’s whisperer
Gladia is based on Whisper, OpenAI’s open-source transcription model. “We started from Whisper. We haven’t reinvented the wheel, but we listened to our customers and they told us: ‘What I want is something that works as well as Whisper,’” Jean-Louis Quéguiner told me.
But Whisper isn’t perfect. The vanilla version is still quite slow, so Gladia has spent a lot of time turning Whisper into a fast and responsive transcription model. That’s not the only issue.