Gladia, a Paris-based speech-to-text AI company, is joining OVH Groupe to accelerate European sovereign AI capabilities. Gladia will maintain its independence as a product line while gaining access to OVH's infrastructure across 46 data centers, enabling lower-latency transcription and deeper EU data residency guarantees. The acquisition follows OVHcloud's earlier purchase of OVHai LLM, building a full-stack European AI ecosystem.
DAI-S2S-ST is a new speech-to-speech model evaluation leaderboard based on 153k human preference ratings across 7 models and 819 prompts, measuring conversational quality through 12 dimensions rather than just task completion. Unlike existing voice benchmarks, it prioritizes naturalness, personality, and interaction quality for long-form conversational use cases, revealing rankings that diverge significantly from task-oriented leaderboards.