 "What's wrong with AI turning your Indian accent into a north-American one?")
Audio start-up Krisp announced on Wednesday that it has developed an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven feature that allows a person’s Indian accept to be converted into American accent for the listener.
While the maker of the feature has floated it as a way to boost connectivity by making communication more accessible, there are concerns about ethical and cultural aspects of the move. There are also fears that the feature could be misused by fraudsters.
To be sure, Krisp is not the first company to come up with such a feature. Previously, call-centre operator Teleperformance had introduced a feature that softens the Indian accent of its staffers to make them more comprehensible to their Western clients.
Krisp has claimed that the feature has already had success, with the feature raising sales conversion rates rose by 26.1 per cent and revenue per book by 14.8 per cent, according to Tech Crunch.
‘We thought changing accents might help people understand better’
Despite concerns in some quarters, Krisp Co-founder Arto Minasyan has said that the feature might help people to help understand each other better.
“Many people don’t understand my accent even though I am speaking English well. We thought changing accents might help people understand each other much better. We started working on this problem two years ago and now we are releasing it in beta,” said Minasyan, according to a press release.
Currently, Krisp’s feature supports more than 17 Indian dialects and the company plans to add more dialects in the future, such as Filipino, as per The Verge.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsThe feature comes bundled in Krisp’s desktop app and functions as a virtual mic that translates the accent as one communicates on an app like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Google Meet.
Minasyan further said, “This isn’t about bias — it’s simply a reality of communication. In fast-paced meetings, even small misunderstandings can slow down decisions, cause repetition, and reduce overall efficiency.”
Pros & cons of accent translation
While Krisp Co-founder Minasyan maintains that the service makes communication easier, there are concerns that it could be misused by fraudsters who could mask their real voices to conduct scams.
There are also ethical concerns that using such a service undermines the person’s individual and cultural identity and promotes homogeneity.
The prevalence of such services may prevent employers as well as staffers from actually working on developing language skills at workplaces. Instead of a person improving their language skills in case they are lacking somewhere, they may now just use such AI-driven services to do the job.
On the positive side, such AI tools can enable those with speech disorders or those learning a new language but lacking verbal proficiency to seek jobs and make a living. It can also open new avenues for the voice acting industry.
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