Accent Altering Voice Technology To Help Communication With Clients

The Sanas company makes software that uses artificial intelligence to remove accents in the speech of non-native, or even native, English speakers and output a more standard version of the language.

The program does phonetic-based speech synthesis in real-time. The voice characteristics remain the same even after the accent is removed. The voice output by the software sounds the same as the voice input, only the accent has been removed but the sex of the speaker is preserved. “What we’re doing is allowing agents to maintain their identity, their accents, without the need to change it,” said Sanas CEO Maxim Serebryakov.

This technology can make companies more efficient and more responsive to consumers, supposes Jack E. Gold, founder and principal analyst at an IT advisory company in Northborough, Mass.

The call center market is enormous. It’s 4% of India’s GDP, 14% of the Philippine’s GDP. Сompanies outsource call center support to different countries and rural parts of the United States. Many call center workers are based overseas and customers could easily have trouble understanding what they’re saying in the case of strong accents. The larger issue is the right selection of employees for the position and the training and processes that are in place to make them successful.

Local people tend to better understand local dialects and associate with them better. Consumers can have a negative reaction when they encounter a support person with a foreign accent at the other end of a support line. A caller could feel that a company is not taking customer support seriously because it’s finding a cheaper solution by outsourcing service to an overseas call center. Besides, some customers might feel that someone overseas might be less able to help them.

For example, a study taken by Zendesk in 2011 showed US customer satisfaction dropping from 79% to 58% when a call center was moved outside the United States.

Millions and millions of people get treated differently because of the way they sound, one of the firm’s founders, Sharath Keshava Narayana, told TechNewsWorld.

But actually the biggest problem with bad customer experience is the lack of support systems, training, and management oversight in the call center. Frequently companies move call centers offshore just to have the phone answered, but in customer service, answering the phone isn’t the most important part, it’s what happens after, experts say. Agents, accent or no accent, will be able to provide winning customer experiences if they are the right person for the role, have the right training, and have the right tools to solve customer problems.

One of the goals of Sanas is to provide people with choice when it comes to their voice. The same way as we use filters on photos before we post them in social networks one’s voice can be altered.

Sanas has initially targeted call centers for its technology, but it can be used for enterprise communication as well. For instance, Samsung has got 70,000 engineers in Korea who interact with engineers in the U.S., and they don’t talk at team meetings because they’re scared how they’ll be interpreted.

The technology also has potential in gaming, health care, telemedicine, and education.