The startup Krisp has announced the launch of a new feature that uses generative AI to change a user’s accent during calls. At the initial stage, it supports converting an Indian accent to American English. According to the company, the accent conversion process preserves the speaker’s natural voice, changing only the phonemes to match the American accent. The feature has already been tested in corporate environments, and a beta version is now available in the Krisp desktop app. Users can activate this feature at any time during a call or before it starts.
The company’s co-founder Arto Minasyan noted that the idea for the feature arose from communication difficulties he personally experienced. “Many people don’t understand my accent, even though I speak English well. We decided that accent modification could help people understand each other better,” he said. The company claims that during corporate testing, sales conversion increased by twenty-six percent.
Krisp trained the model on thousands of speech samples with different accents and dialects, using data from its meeting assistant with users’ consent. An additional advantage of the feature is that it does not require prior training on the user’s voice, creating a speaker profile in real time. The company plans to add support for other accents, including Filipino, in the future.
Krisp intends to release apps for iOS and Android this year to support face-to-face meetings. A new extension for Chrome is also in development for better integration with Google Meet. Free users can use the new feature for up to sixty minutes per day, while the business plan at fifteen dollars per month offers unlimited use.
