In this episode of AI Unveiled, I sit down with Jean-Louis Quéguiner, Founder and CEO of Gladia, a cutting-edge audio infrastructure platform powering voice-first applications. Gladia’s mission? To make voice the ultimate interface for human and machine interactions, starting with state-of-the-art transcription.

Jean-Louis shares his journey from leading AI and big data infrastructure at OVHcloud to launching Gladia, and how the company pivoted from offering 500 APIs to focusing exclusively on voice solutions. He dives into the challenges of building and maintaining real-time voice infrastructure and tackling hallucinations in speech-to-text.

Gladia doesn’t do pre-training and instead fine-tunes foundational models. We discuss risk of commoditization as multimodal models mature and how Gladia is able to differentiate by ingesting and modeling their customer’s specific business context and data.

The conversation explores AI's impact on industries like healthcare, education, and law, as well as the future of real-time transcription and multimodal AI. Jean-Louis also provides insights into the importance of customer intimacy, how Gladia competes with hyperscalers, and why a long-term focus on real-world business problems is more important than chasing hype.

Tune in to learn how Gladia is redefining voice as the interface of the future and what it takes to build a high-impact AI infrastructure company.

Enjoy!

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Timestamps:

*5:03 - What should come first: product or customer development?

*9:37 - Industries that will be most impacted by voice AI

*14:08 - Tackling hallucination

* 39:36 - The impact of multimodal AI

* 44:30- How AI founders can stay ahead of trends

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