Following on February 14's "Finally, hard data on a real-world AI business use case: It’s huge for customer service".
From TechCrunch, February 19:
The demand for voice and speech recognition technologies is massive — and growing. An analysis by market research firm Markets and Markets found that the sector could be worth over $28.1 billion by 2027.
There’s no shortage of vendors providing voice and speech recognition solutions, but some newer upstarts have managed to carve out niches. Sanas is a good example. Founded in 2020, the company develops software that uses AI to adjust a speaker’s accent in real-time.
“At Sanas, we believe that while technology is transforming the industry, it shouldn’t replace human connection, but rather, enhance it,” Sharath Keshava Narayana, Sanas’ co-founder and president, told TechCrunch. “With the number of customer interactions continuing to scale globally, the need for human-to-human communication remains critical.”
Maxim Serebryakov launched Sanas with Shawn Zhang and AndrĂ©s Soderi while in college. The trio was inspired by a fellow student’s frustrating experience working in a call center.
“Max and Shawn’s friend, Raul, who had to return to Nicaragua to support his family, faced accent discrimination at his call center job,” Narayana said. “His experience with ‘accent neutralization training’ and the toll it took on him inspired Max and Shawn to build a solution to reduce accent bias.”....
....MUCH MORE
