It's hard to communicate if you're not being understood.
That simple truism — one with which they'd had first-hand experience — offered a guiding insight for the founders of Sanas.ai Inc. It inspired them to develop software that's able to translate between different English accents. They designed an app that helps people communicating over the internet, who happen to speak differently, to understand each other.
"We could make any sort of speech sound like any other sort of speech" said Maxim Serebryakov, one of Palo Alto-based Sanas' co-founders. He continued: "It’s really a universal algorithm."
Serebryakov launched Sanas last year with fellow Stanford graduates Andres Perez Soderi and Shawn Zhang. A story from a friend who'd moved back to his native country of Nicaragua spurred the trio to develop their app.
The friend, who'd studied systems engineering at Stanford, was working at a call center helping people fix their computer systems. However, he was struggling to be understood by customers.
"You'd think a Stanford systems engineer would outperform everyone at a call center," Serebryakov said. But because he couldn't be understood, Serebryakov continued, "he was underperforming relative to the other agents."
Sanas' three founders all knew that frustration of being misunderstood. All three are immigrants — Serebryakov hails from Russia, Perez Soderi from Venezuela and Zhang from China.
As they themselves acknowledge, they all have accents that are distinct from American English and from each other's.
"We created Sanas after our own struggles with each other's accents," they say on their website.
Users can talk normally and be understood
The software they developed can recognize and understand six different English-language accents — American English, Indian English, Spanish English, British English, Filipino English and Australian English. It can then translate those into whatever English accent a user on the other end may prefer.
The software plugs into Zoom and other communications apps, allowing real-time accent translation.
"You simply speak as you normally would, and our desktop application will change the output ... keeping it just as natural," Serebryakov said. "It's just like an intermediary between your microphone and Zoom."
Sanas is working with seven different companies that handle business processes like customer service and invoicing on behalf of corporate clients, Perez Soderi said. Its first customers just started live deployments of its software.
After closing a $5.5 million seed funding round last month, Sanas has raised about $6 million total. Its investors include Human Capital, General Catalyst, Quiet Capital and DN Capital.
When the co-founders started on their path toward translating accents, the task felt overwhelming, like "boiling the ocean," Perez Soderi said.
"One of the struggles that we had is where do we even start ... how do we understand where the biggest need is," Perez Soderi said. "One of the real wins was hearing the algorithm speak for itself for the first time, and being able to see all our other work going into it together."
Serebryakov agreed, adding that a number of potential customers have contacted the company since hearing about its product.
"We've been getting so many (inquiries) from people talking about how this could impact their life," he said.
