India set to become Krisp’s largest voice AI deployment market: CEO | Company News

Krisp, an AI-based audio processing software company, expects India to become its largest market in terms of deployment, overtaking the Philippines in the next few years as voice artificial intelligence (AI) moves beyond early experimentation towards multilingual, integrated and outcome-oriented deployments.

Krisp has three business verticals: AI meeting assistants, which take notes and transcribe meetings in real time; call centre AI, which cancels background noise and helps with accent conversion; and application programming interfaces (APIs), which power the world’s largest frontier labs, communication platforms and gaming platforms.

The deployment, according to Krisp, will come through its voice translation service, part of the call centre vertical, though at present, noise cancellation and accent conversion services dominate.

“Voice translation is growing so fast that I think in a year from now, it’s going to overtake everything else out there. The world is adopting voice translation today and we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg. But once the world has a bit more trust into this, then we will see everyone lean on this technology and all these workloads are going to come to India, mostly India,” Davit Baghdasaryan, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO), said in an interaction.

The US is by far the biggest market for Krisp, which has raised just $20 million since starting in 2017. The company has revenue of less than $500 million.

“With voice translation being a powerful force, you could see a voice renaissance happening to India. More and more companies can now adopt or appoint employees in tier-one, tier-two, tier-three cities and be able to service customers across the world without worrying about their English proficiency and mother tongue influence anymore,” Vimal Nair, the company’s chief growth officer, added.

According to a survey by Nasscom and Krisp, over one-third of organisations in India have moved beyond bilingual voice AI, supporting at least three Indian languages in production. Multilingual agents capable of handling four or more languages are also emerging as a growing deployment category.

The key proof point for voice AI is efficiency as leaders move from measuring activity to business-outcome metrics. According to the survey, 61 per cent of respondents reported more than a 20 per cent reduction in cost per eligible interaction, showing that efficiency gains are already visible for many organisations. Thirty per cent of organisations with scaled deployments also reported a positive impact on their revenue.

For example, Krisp’s technology can already translate 12 Indian languages accurately, while six more are being refined to improve performance. Most of these services are used in call centres across healthcare, retail, telecom and financial services.

“Earlier Philippines had the advantage that they had good accents, or even if the accents were not good, they had good grammar. India didn’t have that advantage and the accents were difficult. Now India has no reason to be behind. We could be servicing any kind of work, and our accent neutralization allows the Indian agents to be understood as good as an American person or a Filipino agent or any other language agent. So yes, we have overcome many of these maybe starting troubles or hurdles on the way with the improvement of technology, and that’s only going to become better in the coming years,” said Baghdasaryan.