Audio startup Krisp on Wednesday stated it’s launching a brand new characteristic that makes use of AI to alter a consumer’s accent throughout calls. The corporate is initially rolling out help for altering Indian English accents to U.S. English.
The startup says the accent conversion course of preserves the speaker’s voice and solely switches phonemes to match American accents. The characteristic has apparently been examined in enterprise environments, and a beta model is now coming to the Krisp desktop app. Customers can flip the characteristic on any time throughout or earlier than calls.
Arto Minasyan, the corporate’s co-founder, stated the thought for the characteristic stemmed from an issue he confronted in his conversations. “Many individuals don’t perceive my accent regardless that I’m talking English nicely. We thought altering accents may assist individuals perceive one another a lot better. We began engaged on this drawback two years in the past and now we’re releasing it in beta,” Minasyan stated.
Nevertheless, when this reporter examined the characteristic, the processed voice didn’t sound pure and even missed some phrases at instances. The corporate attributed these faults to this being a beta launch, saying the mannequin would enhance over time.
Krisp claims that when it examined the characteristic with enterprises, gross sales conversion charges rose by 26.1% and income per e book jumped by 14.8%.
The corporate stated that it determined to work on Indian accents first as individuals from the nation account for a big portion of the worldwide workforce in STEM fields. There are plans so as to add help for extra accents, together with Filipino.
Different startups like GV-backed Sanas have deployed related expertise in name facilities at scale.
The corporate says it educated the mannequin on hundreds of speech samples that lined totally different accents and dialects, and used knowledge from its assembly assistant after getting consumer consent.
Minasyan stated one other benefit of the characteristic is that it doesn’t want any pre-training on a consumer’s voice because it creates a profile for the speaker in actual time.
Krisp, which final raised capital in 2021, plans to launch iOS and Android apps this yr to help in-person conferences. There’s additionally a brand new Chrome extension for higher integration with Google Meet within the works.
