TGIF, Future of Workers.
Today, let’s talk for a moment about the importance of real-time audio transcription.
The ability to convert spoken language into written text as it’s actively being spoken is a game-changer for a whole handful of reasons. It helps make spoken content accessible to individuals with hearing impairments (or for those who prefer to read, rather than listen), it can save time and manual effort by automating note-taking processes in meetings, and it can be used for future analysis and understanding the intricacies of spoken content. (e.g. identifying important keywords, entire topics, speakers’ sentiments, etc.)
Additionally, there’s the element of reliability here. We’ve seen many modern transcription tools debuted over the years, but accuracy has unfortunately felt like an oft-moving target. Refining such tools to ensure they’re reliable for users in need is critical.
Enter Gladia.
The team at Gladia recognizes how voice is still the primary means through which humans communicate; that’s applicable to when we’re talking (pun intended) about one-on-one brainstorm sessions, round-the-conference-table discussions, virtual meetings, customer support calls, you name it. Even with due consideration to the prevalence of social media platforms and text-based community forums rife with discourse, “words spoken have value we can’t afford to lose,” as Gladia put it.
And so, Gladia’s M.O. addresses a pressing need — make it possible for any company out there to easily embed cutting-edge audio transcription into their products; whatever the language, industry or tech stack. Right now, Gladia’s audio transcription API supports myriad audio formats and codecs (from WAV and M4A to FLAC and AAC), and its services are delivered in a cloud-hosted environment which can be customized to users’ respective geographical footprints. Furthermore, it takes less than 300 milliseconds to transcribe a real-time call or meeting (with minimal additional latency to generate summaries and extract insights), with a Word Error Rate (WER) of only 5%. This ensures speech recognition and transcription come without errors or hallucinations for the best-possible information fidelity. (And let’s not forget about Gladia’s support for any-to-any translation, accents and code-switching for 100+ languages.)
“Audio transcription is the foundation of many great platforms today, so it needs to be rock-solid,” one Gladia representative wrote. “From assisting sales agents on call to providing automated customer support, we have designed the best platform-agnostic platform to power all key enterprise use cases — and going beyond just transcription. Our commitment extends to helping you leverage in-depth insights and metadata from every call and meeting.”
It’s clear that a through-thread here is three-fold; a.) general technological accessibility, and b.) sheer accuracy, and c.) robust multilingual support.
This through-thread leads us to the following news:
This week, Gladia announced that it completed a $16 million Series A funding round. This funding will reportedly be used to, quote, “develop an end-to-end audio infrastructure – starting with a new real-time audio transcription and analytics engine – enabling voice-first platforms to deliver more value to their users across borders with cutting-edge AI.”
The quick investor rundown:
This funding round was led by XAnge, with participation by Illuminate Financial, XTX Ventures, Athletico Ventures, Gaingels, Mana Ventures, Motier Ventures, Roosh Ventures, and Soma Capital. Founded in 2022, Gladia has raised a total of $20.3 million, with earlier seed investments headed by New Wave, Sequoia Capital (as part of the First Sequoia Arc program), Cocoa, and GFC.
“Gladia represents the qualities we like to champion at XAnge: a bold, global tech team at the forefront of AI innovation, with a proven business model to unlock new opportunities across industries," said Alexis du Peloux, Partner at XAnge. "In a fast-paced AI environment, Jean-Louis Quéguiner and his team have executed extremely well, and we are proud to back Gladia for the Series A.”
Of course, Gladia CEO and co-founder Jean-Louis Quéguiner also commented.
“I founded Gladia for a very personal reason – I was frustrated that existing audio transcription services were not able to understand my French accent,” Quéguiner explained. “Our international team and customers often switch between languages during meetings, but finding a transcription solution that can handle different languages and accents simultaneously was impossible.”
The long-story-short version?
Given that near-countless speech recognition models today are trained predominantly on English audio date alone (therefore inherently biased), Gladia is prioritizing its truly multilingual, accuracy-first, fine-tuned engine that adapts on the fly and provides speakers with exactly what they need to communicate effectively, initial language and technology barriers be damned.
Read more about Gladia’s Real-Time AI and other future-of-work-centric solutions in its recent blog post here.
Be part of the conversation about the Future of Work and how both customer and employee experiences are changing, at Future of Work Expo 2025. The conference focuses on key elements of today's reimagined workplace; not just for improving productivity, but also providing better experiences through the intersection of technology like AI and the human element. Future of Work Expo is taking place February 11-13, 2025, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Edited by
Greg Tavarez
