Accent Altering Voice Tech Aims to Replace Frustration With Communication

 

 

Having trouble understanding the person at the end of the support line you called to get customer service? One Silicon Valley company wants to make those kinds of problems a thing of the past.

The company, Sanas, makes software that uses artificial intelligence to remove accents from the speech of non-native, or even native, English speakers and produce a more standardized version of the language. "The program synthesizes speech based on phonetics in real time," Sarath Keshava Narayana, one of the firm's founders. 

Also, the voice characteristics remain the same even after accent removal. The voice output by the software sounds like the voice input, only the accent is removed, for example, the speaker's gender is preserved.

"What we're doing is allowing agents to keep their identity, keep their tone, not have to change it," said Sanas CEO Maxim Serebryakov.

"The call center market is huge. It's 4% of India's GDP, 14% of Philippines' GDP," he told TechNewsWorld. "We're not talking about a few thousand people who are discriminated against on a daily basis because of their cultural identity. We're talking about millions and millions of people who have are treated differently because of their voice.

"The concept is sound. If they can make it work, that's a big deal," observed Jack E. Gould, founder and principal analyst at Jay Gould Associates, an IT advisory company in Northborough, Mass.

"It can make companies more efficient and more efficient and more responsive to consumers,"

Talking Local

Gould explained that local people understand local dialects better and relate to them better. "Even talking to someone with a heavy Southern accent sometimes turns me off," said the Massachusetts resident. "It affects the effectiveness of the call center if you can be like me too much."

"Many call center workers are based overseas and customers can easily have trouble understanding what they're saying when they have a strong accent," said John Harmon, a senior analyst at CoreSite Research, which is a global consulting and research firm specializing in retail and technology.

However, Taylor Goucher, COO of Connext Global Solutions, an outsourcing company in Honolulu, moderated the tone given the customer frustration.

"It's well known that companies outsource call center support to different countries and rural parts of the United States," he told TechNewsWorld. "The big issue is selecting the right employees for the position and training and processes to make them successful."

Customer Perceptions

Harmon noted that customers can have a negative reaction when they meet a support person with a foreign accent on the other end of the support line. "A caller may feel that a company is not taking customer support seriously because they are looking for a cheap solution by outsourcing the service to an overseas call center," he said.

"Also," he added, "some clients may feel that no one overseas is able to help them."

Goucher cited a 2011 study by Zendesk that found customer satisfaction dropped from 79% to 58% when a call center was moved out of the United States. "Everybody I know has probably had a bad customer experience at some point in their life with an agent they couldn't understand," he observed.

He noted that the main cause of poor customer experience is the lack of support systems, training and management oversight in the call center.

"Often we see companies moving call centers offshore to answer the phone." They said. "In customer service, answering the phone isn't the most important part, it's what happens next."

"Agents, accent or no accent, will be able to deliver 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," he added. are." "It's easy to call tone a problem."

Bias Against Accents

Gould observed that when a customer support person doesn't have the tools to resolve a problem, it can lead to huge frustration for the customer. "If I call somebody, I want my problem to be solved, and I don't want to go through 88 steps to get there," he said. "This is disappointing to me because I just spent money with your company."

"Anything that can be done to get over the hump quickly has multiple benefits," he continued. "From the customer's point of view, it has the advantage of not bothering me. Plus, if I can get through faster, it means the operator can spend less time with me and handle more calls. And if I can fix the problem better, I won't need to call about it again.

Regardless of whether the customer support person has the tools they need to provide top-notch service, accents can affect the caller's response to the person on the other end of the phone line.

"A customer might be confused about decoding a foreign accent," Harmon said. "There is also the stereotype that some American accents sound uneducated, and a customer may feel like the service provider is getting cheap help."

"In some cases, I think the biggest preconceived notion is that if the agent has an accent, they're not going to be able to solve my problem," Goucher added.

Choice for Voice

Serebryakov noted that one of the goals of Sanas is to give people a choice when it comes to their voice. "When we post photos on Instagram, we can use filters to represent ourselves," he explained. "But you don't have that kind of source for voice. Our mission at Sanas is to provide that kind of choice.

Although Sanas has initially targeted call centers for its technology, there are other areas for it as well.

"The biggest use of the technology we see is enterprise communications," Narayana said. "We got a call from Samsung saying they have 70,000 engineers in Korea communicating with engineers in the US, and They do not speak up in team meetings because they are afraid of how they will be interpreted. That's the next use case we want to address."

The technology also has potential in gaming, healthcare, telemedicine and education, he added.

Sanas announced a $32 million Series A on June 22, the largest Series A round in history for a speech technology company.