Gladia turns recorded or live speech into text for developers building meeting assistants, customer-support software and voice agents. A software company uses Gladia behind its own application: its users can read a transcript, search a call or receive a summary without knowing which speech provider processed the audio.

For a recorded sales call, the developer uploads the recording or supplies its file address, chooses a model and enables options such as speaker labels or translation. Gladia returns a job identifier; once processing finishes, the application retrieves the transcript with timestamps and speaker labels, then displays it alongside the recording or copies selected details into a customer record. Developers can also request summaries, extract names and organizations, or remove specified categories of personal information from the text.

For a live call, the application opens a continuing connection and sends audio as the participants speak. Gladia sends back provisional text followed by finalized passages, allowing the application to display captions or feed a voice agent's next response. Live transcription does not currently identify speakers automatically; developers needing speaker labels can process the recording after the call.

Solaria-1 supports more than 100 languages and can handle speakers changing languages during a conversation. Solaria-3 focuses on English, French, German, Spanish and Italian business recordings; it currently processes recorded audio only and requires one specified language per job. The distinction matters: a customer cannot assume the newer model supports every language or live workflow available elsewhere in Gladia's API.

Software companies pay Gladia for the hours of audio their applications process, with extra charges for selected analysis features. Self-serve customers fund a prepaid credit balance, manually or through automatic top-ups, while larger customers negotiate annual Enterprise contracts with custom models, hosting and support.

As of October 2026, published starting rates are €0.16 per recorded hour on Solaria-3, €0.27 on Solaria-1 and €0.68 for live transcription. Recorded-audio rates decline with monthly volume; Solaria-3 reaches €0.12 per hour above 10,000 hours. Summarization adds €0.03 per audio hour, translation €0.05 and personal-information redaction €0.07; sending a transcript to a language model is billed separately by input and output tokens.

Gladia must pay for computing, storage, networking, model development and customer support out of those charges. Processing recordings in batches can use computing capacity differently from keeping a live connection responsive, while model size and optional analysis change the work required per hour. Volume discounts therefore grow usage without necessarily growing profit at the same rate; the cost of serving each workload determines what Gladia keeps.

Free trial credits and developer documentation let a team test its own recordings before adding Gladia to a product. Enterprise sales address dedicated infrastructure, contractual data safeguards and reliability requirements that a developer cannot approve alone. OVHcloud adds a route to customers already buying cloud infrastructure from Gladia's parent, potentially lowering the work needed to introduce another supplier.

Gladia competes directly with Deepgram, AssemblyAI and Speechmatics for the transcription inside other companies' applications. Buyers compare how each handles their actual recordings, languages, response times and data requirements; a headline accuracy score on clean speech does not settle which provider will correctly transcribe a noisy customer call.

Deepgram offers Nova for general transcription and Flux for voice agents, including detection of when a caller has finished speaking. That helps it compete for applications where deciding when to respond matters as much as recognizing the words. Gladia's broad language coverage and recorded-call analysis give developers another route, but it must win on the complete experience rather than assuming a fast transcript replaces conversational turn-taking.

AssemblyAI combines recorded transcription, streaming models and tools for interpreting transcripts. Its promptable speech models let developers supply names, terminology and formatting instructions before processing, competing with Gladia for business recordings where a wrong product name or account number can make an otherwise readable transcript unusable. Both publish favorable benchmarks, making customer-specific tests more useful than treating either vendor's leaderboard as a universal ranking.

Speechmatics supports cloud, on-premise and on-device deployment across more than 55 languages. Running speech recognition inside a customer's own environment can win work where audio cannot leave that environment, even against a provider with broader language coverage. Gladia's European roots and OVHcloud ownership strengthen its alternative for buyers willing to use hosted infrastructure, but do not automatically replace a requirement for customer-operated deployment.

Gladia can expand beyond supplying transcripts to software developers by reaching buyers with broader infrastructure, compliance and automation budgets. OVHcloud distribution and Gladia's existing audio-analysis features provide entry points, but each opportunity requires more than processing additional minutes for an existing meeting app.

OVH Groupe explicitly plans to distribute voice AI services through OVHcloud and OVHai. That opens a path to public bodies and enterprises buying European cloud infrastructure as a package, rather than independently selecting a transcription API. Gladia could become a component of those larger contracts, provided the group can meet each buyer's hosting, integration and procurement requirements; the acquisition supplies distribution, not proof of completed deployments.

Healthcare documentation and financial call-recording systems require more than readable text: buyers need controlled access, retention settings, contractual safeguards and reliable handling of specialized terminology. Gladia offers healthcare business associate agreements and HDS hosting for enterprise customers, giving it a starting point for these applications. Capturing dedicated compliance and documentation budgets would require validating each workflow and its records, rather than treating a general security certification as approval for every regulated use.

A company buying automated phone support is spending against the cost of handling a call, rather than merely storing its transcript. Gladia already supplies live text that an application can pass to a language model, while OVH Groupe has identified agentic AI as a reason for the acquisition. It could capture more of that budget by combining recognition, response generation and spoken replies through the group's services; doing so would require reliable turn-taking and integrations with business systems, not just a faster transcription model.

Price pressure: Gladia charges as little as €0.12 per recorded hour at higher Solaria-3 volumes, while rivals also compete on low-cost transcription. If prices fall faster than its computing and support costs, higher usage may produce little additional gross profit.

Workflow limitations: Solaria-3's five-language, recorded-only scope and the absence of live speaker identification limit which jobs can use Gladia's newest capabilities. Errors in names, numbers or speaker attribution can force customers to add review steps or choose another provider for consequential records.

Acquisition execution: OVH Groupe bought Gladia to add voice capabilities to its cloud and AI services, with some consideration tied to later performance. Integration must deliver usable products and distribution without weakening the developer experience or delaying the specialist improvements needed to compete with independent speech providers.