Audio startup Krisp on Wednesday said it is launching a new feature that uses AI to change a user’s accent during calls. The company is initially rolling out support for changing Indian English accents to U.S. English.
The startup says the accent conversion process preserves the speaker’s voice and only switches phonemes to match American accents. The feature has apparently been tested in enterprise environments, and a beta version is now coming to the Krisp desktop app. Users can turn the feature on any time during or before calls.
Arto Minasyan, the company’s co-founder, said the idea for the feature stemmed from a problem he faced in his conversations. “Many people don’t understand my accent even though I am speaking English well. We thought changing accents might help people understand each other much better. We started working on this problem two years ago and now we are releasing it in beta,” Minasyan said.
However, when this reporter tested the feature, the processed voice didn’t sound natural and even missed some words at times. The company attributed those faults to this being a beta release, saying the model would improve over time.
Krisp claims that when it tested the feature with enterprises, sales conversion rates rose by 26.1% and revenue per book jumped by 14.8%.
The company said that it decided to work on Indian accents first as people from the country account for a large portion of the global workforce in STEM fields. There are plans to add support for more accents, including Filipino.
Other startups like GV-backed Sanas have deployed similar technology in call centers at scale.
The company says it trained the model on thousands of speech samples that covered different accents and dialects, and used data from its meeting assistant after getting user consent.
Minasyan said another advantage of the feature is that it doesn’t need any pre-training on a user’s voice as it creates a profile for the speaker in real time.
Krisp, which last raised capital in 2021, plans to release iOS and Android apps this year to support in-person meetings. There’s also a new Chrome extension for better integration with Google Meet in the works.