We give the spoken word a memory.
Made in Europe · Built to be trusted · Since 2016
Founded in Paris, Voxist turns the most natural way people communicate into something organisations can read, search, trust, and act on. This is the story of how — and the people behind it.
Verba volant, scripta manent.
Spoken words fly away. We exist to make them stay.
Every day, the most valuable things in an organisation are said out loud — in calls, in meetings, on voicemail — and then they're gone. Verba volant, scripta manent: spoken words fly away; written words remain. It's the oldest reason humans learned to write things down, and it's the conviction Voxist was built on.
We believe the spoken word deserves the same permanence, structure, and usefulness as everything else a business runs on. And we believe that for European organisations, that voice — and the knowledge inside it — should never have to leave European hands to be understood. Sovereignty isn't something we added late. It's the reason we exist where we do, the way we do.
It started with a frustration, not a lab.
Voxist grew out of something its founder had carried through two decades in telecom: voice was everywhere in how people communicate, and almost none of it was ever captured or understood.
Karel Bourgois spent two decades inside telecom — building mobile products at Alcatel across North America, then voice-and-video apps at Orange, including the Libon messenger. A Fulbright scholar trained at UCLA and NYU Stern, he kept running into the same gap: the spoken word carried the most important information, and the least of it was ever kept.
Voxist was founded in Paris on a deceptively small premise: voicemail shouldn’t be a chore you dread — it should be an intelligent assistant that reads your messages back to you. Beneath it sat a far larger ambition: turning speech itself into knowledge.
The visual-voicemail app — transcribing messages and greeting callers in your own synthetic voice — grew past 30,000 users, transcribed in more than 70 languages, and reached subscribers through mobile carriers and platforms like Cisco's. The engine was forged on real, noisy, everyday audio — not studio recordings.
A speech engine proven at consumer scale — and unusually efficient — was too valuable to keep inside a single app. Voxist turned it outward into a voice-to-knowledge platform for enterprises: transcribe the spoken word, fold it into a company’s own data, and put it to work for the people who make decisions.
Voxist’s speech intelligence now runs across telecom (voicemail assistants and callbots), healthcare (around 10,000 medical reports transcribed every month), and enterprise knowledge — capturing hard-won expertise before it retires out the door. It operates inside a Fortune 100 consumer-goods corporation, a leading US specialty insurer, and major financial institutions.
We don't just talk about trustworthy AI. We help build it.
Conviction is easy to claim. Here is where Voxist puts it on the record — alongside the institutions and infrastructure shaping European AI.
ELLIOT
Voxist is a funded partner in ELLIOT, the EU's flagship initiative for open, trustworthy multimodal foundation models — 34 organisations across 13 countries, on Europe's fastest supercomputers. As one of just two French partners, Voxist leads speech-understanding work, including detecting disinformation in real time.
Sovereign by default
Voxist runs on European sovereign cloud and reaches the market through the companies that define that ecosystem — OVHcloud, Scaleway, Cisco, and Deutsche Telekom. SaaS or on-premise, your data stays inside your perimeter and under EU law.
Le Voice Lab
Founder Karel Bourgois presides over Le Voice Lab, France's voice-technology association, and leads technology work at Hub France IA — pooling sovereign French speech data and helping shape the rules for European voice AI.
“Speech is becoming a key frontier for trustworthy AI.”
— ELLIOT, on Voxist's work within the project
A small team in Paris, by design.
The people who build Voxist are speech scientists and telecom engineers who would rather go deep than go wide. It's how a compact European team ends up out-measuring labs many times its size.
Twenty years in telecom — Alcatel, Orange — before founding Voxist in 2016. Fulbright scholar; MS in Telecommunications, UCLA; MBA, NYU Stern. President of Le Voice Lab and a technology lead at Hub France IA.
“We built Voxist because the most useful things people say were the things no one could ever find again. That’s a solvable problem — and a European one.”
Focus is the strategy. We stay small on purpose, hold ourselves to research-grade speech science, and measure ourselves on real-world audio rather than headcount or hype. It’s the only way a team this size earns trust from a Fortune 100.