Gladia, founded in France in 2022, builds its speech-to-text API on top of Whisper rather than training a model completely from scratch, but adds its own tuning specifically for real-world audio: accented speech, overlapping speakers, and multilingual conversations that switch languages mid-sentence, cases that trip up more narrowly trained models.
Being based in the EU also matters to a specific set of customers: European companies needing data processing that stays within EU jurisdiction for compliance reasons have a regional option instead of routing audio through US-based infrastructure. Real-time transcription, speaker diarization, and summarization round out an API built for the same call-center and voice-agent use cases as its US competitors.
Pricing runs on usage-based API rates with a free tier for testing. For a European company that needs both strong multilingual accuracy and EU-based data handling, Gladia's regional base and Whisper-tuned approach solve two requirements at once that US-based speech APIs don't directly address.
