Changing the tone of voice tech aims to replace frustration with communication.

Having trouble understanding that person at the end of the support line you called for some customer service? The Silicon Valley company wants to make these kinds of problems a thing of the past.

The company makes software that uses artificial intelligence to remove accents from non-native, non-native, or even non-native speakers of English and produce a more formal version of the language. “The program does phonetic-based speech synthesis in real time,” one of the company’s founders, Sharath Keshava Narayana, told TechNewsWorld.

In addition, the character of the voice is the same even after it is removed. The software’s audio output sounds identical to the audio input, only the accent is removed, for example the speaker’s gender is preserved.

“What we’re doing is allowing agents to keep their identities, keep their accents,” Sanas CEO Maxim Serebryakov said.

“The call center market is huge. 4% of India’s GDP, 14% of the Philippines’ GDP,” he told TechNewsWorld. “It’s not every day that we’re talking about a few thousand people being discriminated against because of their cultural identity. We are talking about millions and millions of people being treated differently because of their voice.

“The idea is sound. If you can make it work, it’s a big deal,” said Jack E.

“It can make companies more efficient and more effective and more responsive to consumers,” he told TechNewsWorld.

Local talk

Gold explained that locals tend to understand local dialects better and communicate better with them. “Even talking to someone with a heavy southern accent sometimes gives me pause,” says the Massachusetts resident. “If you can have a lot like me, it affects the efficiency of the call center.”

John Harmon, senior analyst at Coresight Research, a global consulting and research firm specializing in retail and technology, said: “Many call center workers are based overseas and find it difficult to easily understand what customers are saying in loud conversations. He told TechNewsWorld.

“The same could be true for regional US dialects,” he added.

However, Taylor Gaucher, COO of Connext Global Solutions, a Honolulu-based outsourcing company, cites discounts as a source of customer frustration.

“Companies are known to provide call center support to different countries and rural areas of the United States,” he told TechNewsWorld. “The biggest issue is selecting the right staff for the job and training and making the process effective.”

Customer insights

On the other end of the spectrum, Harmon said, consumers may react negatively when they encounter a supporter with a foreign accent. “The caller may feel that a company doesn’t take customer support seriously because they’re getting a cheap solution by outsourcing call center services overseas,” he said.

He added: “Also, some customers may feel that someone overseas cannot help them.

Gaucher cited a 2011 study by Zendesk that showed customer satisfaction dropped from 79% to 58% when a call center was moved outside the United States. “Everybody I know has probably had a poor customer experience with an agent at some point in their life,” he says.

He pointed out that the biggest problem related to bad customer experience is the lack of support system, training and management control at the call center.

“Too often we see companies moving call centers offshore to answer the phone.” he said. “Answering the phone is not the most important part of customer service, it happens later.”

“Agents, accent or no accent, can provide a winning experience if they are the right person for the role, if they have the right training and if they have the right tools to solve customer problems,” he said. “It’s easy to say that rhetoric is the problem.”

Bias for opinions

If a customer support person doesn’t have the tools to solve the problem, it can be a huge frustration for the customer, Gold observes. “If I call somebody, I want my problem solved, and I don’t want to go through 88 steps to get there,” he said. “It’s disappointing for me because I spent a whole lot of money with your company.”

“Anything to get over that hump quickly has multiple benefits,” he continued. “From a consumer perspective, there’s an advantage that I’m not angry. Also, if I can get through quickly, it means that the service person can spend less time with me and handle more calls. And if I can solve the problem better, I won’t have to call about it again.

While a customer support person has the tools they need to provide top-notch service, accents can affect the response of the person on the other end of the phone line.

“It can be frustrating for a customer to have a foreign accent,” says Harmon. “There is also a stereotype that some American accents seem uneducated, and a customer may feel that the service provider is getting cheap support.”

“In some cases, I think the biggest preexisting bias is that if the agent has a conversation, they can’t solve my problem,” Goucher added.

For voice selection

Serebryakov explained that one of Sanas’ aims is to give people a choice when it comes to their vote. “When we post photos on Instagram, we can use filters to represent ourselves however we want,” he explained. “But you don’t have the same medium for audio. Our Sanas mission is to provide such a choice.

Although Sanas initially targeted call centers for the technology, there are other areas of potential for it.

“One of the biggest uses we see for the technology is enterprise connectivity,” Narayana said. “We got a phone call from Samsung saying that 70,000 engineers in Korea communicate with engineers in America, and they don’t talk in team meetings because they’re afraid of how they’ll be interpreted. That’s the next use case we want to solve.”

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

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