One of the reasons call center employees burn out so quickly is that they're frequently forced to deal with abusive callers. This abuse often comes in the form of bigoted tirades from American clients. Maxim Serebryakov, the 24 year-old CEO of Palo Alto-based accent augmentation company Sanas, saw this problem up close when his friend Raul Garcia Letona was forced to leave Stanford and support his family in Nicaragua by getting a job at a call center. Serebryakov began toying with the idea of using artificial intelligence to change a call center agent's accent in real time, and in 2020 co-founded Sanas. By processing a multitude of voices and corresponding transcripts through an algorithm, Sanas allows call center agents to choose how their accent will sound to clients.