Sanas aims to convert one accent to another in real time for smoother customer service calls – TechCrunch

In the customer service industry, your accent dictates many aspects of your job. It shouldn't be the case that there's a "better" or "worse" accent, but in today's global economy (though who knows about tomorrow's) it's valuable to sound American or British. While many undergo accent neutralization training, Sanas is a startup with another approach (and a $5.5M seed round): using speech recognition and synthesis to change the speaker's accent in near real time. The company has trained a machine learning algorithm to quickly and locally (that is, without using the cloud) recognize a person's speech on one end and, on the other, output the same words with an accent chosen from a list or automatically detected from the other person's speech. It slots right into the OS's sound stack so it works out of the box with pretty much any audio or video calling tool. Right now the company is operating a pilot program with thousands of people in locations from the USA and UK to the Philippines, India, Latin America, and others.