Audio startup Krisp on Wednesday mentioned it’s launching a brand new function that makes use of AI to vary a person’s accent throughout calls. The corporate is initially rolling out assist 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 function has apparently been examined in enterprise environments, and a beta model is now coming to the Krisp desktop app. Customers can flip the function on any time throughout or earlier than calls.
Arto Minasyan, the corporate’s co-founder, mentioned the thought for the function stemmed from an issue he confronted 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 mentioned.
Nevertheless, when this reporter examined the function, the processed voice didn’t sound pure and even missed some phrases at occasions. 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 function with enterprises, gross sales conversion charges rose by 26.1% and income per e-book jumped by 14.8%.
The corporate mentioned that it determined to work on Indian accents first as folks from the nation account for a big portion of the worldwide workforce in STEM fields. There are plans so as to add assist 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 completely different accents and dialects, and used knowledge from its assembly assistant after getting person consent.
Minasyan mentioned one other benefit of the function is that it doesn’t want any pre-training on a person’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 assist in-person conferences. There’s additionally a brand new Chrome extension for higher integration with Google Meet within the works.
