The startup says the accent-shifting process preserves the speaker's voice and only switches phonemes to match an American accent. The feature has apparently been tested in enterprise environments, with a beta version now available in the Krisp desktop app. Users can enable this feature anytime during or before a call.
Company co-founder Arto Minasyan said the idea for the feature came from a question he encountered during a conversation. "Even though I speak good English, a lot of people don't understand my accent. We thought changing the accent might help people understand each other better. We started working on this two years ago and now we're launching a beta version," Minasyan said.
However, when reporters tested this feature, they found that the processed speech sounded unnatural and sometimes even missed some words. The company blamed the flaws on this being a beta version and said the model would improve over time.
Krisp claims that when it tested the feature with businesses, sales conversion rates increased by 26.1% and unit sales increased by 14.8%.
The company said it decided to study Indian accents first because Indians make up a large portion of the global workforce in STEM fields. They plan to add support for more accents, including Filipino accents.
Other startups, such as GV-backed Sanas, have deployed similar technology at scale in call centers.
The company said it trained the model on thousands of speech samples covering different accents and dialects, and used data from the conferencing assistant with user consent. Another advantage of this feature is that it does not require any pre-training of the user's voice, as it creates a profile of the speaker in real time.
Krisp last raised funding in 2021, and the company plans to release iOS and Android apps this year to support in-person meetings. Additionally, the company is working on a new Chrome extension for better integration with Google Meet.