Home / Founders / Jean-Louis Quéguiner
Quéguiner is betting that speech recognition for the rest of the world's languages needs a European, multilingual approach rather than English-first models.
Jean-Louis Quéguiner is founder and chief executive of Gladia, a Paris speech recognition company whose API transcribes and enriches audio from uploads, live streams, phone calls, and meeting bots.
A Decade in Cloud AI
Before Gladia, Quéguiner was Group Vice President of Data, AI and Quantum Computing at OVHcloud, one of Europe's largest cloud providers, according to Unite.AI. He holds a master's degree in symbolic AI from the University of Québec and Arts et Métiers ParisTech, and earlier worked in financial data analytics and machine learning for real-time advertising.
Narrowing a Broad Idea to Voice
He has said the first goal for Gladia was broad: an AI company that made complex technology easier to use, born of his frustration at how hard it was to get started with data and ML tools, as he told OVHcloud. As the team dug in, voice stood out as the most broken and most critical area, and Gladia narrowed to speech-to-text.
Tuning Models Beyond English
Working with OpenAI's Whisper, the team found that it hallucinated words and leaned heavily toward English. Quéguiner pushed Gladia to fine-tune its own models for many languages and to cut latency for live calls, working with a chief technology officer who brought network expertise from Sigfox.
Personal Life
Quéguiner leads Gladia from France. He describes the company as a European, multilingual team, and that background shapes its focus on languages beyond English.
