India set to become Krisp's largest voice AI deployment market: CEO

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

Krisp has three business verticals -- AI meeting assistants, which takes down notes and transcribes meetings in real time; call centre AI that cancels background noise and helps accent conversion; and application programming interface (API), which powers 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 the noise cancellation and the accent conversion services contribute a majority to its topline. 

“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 leaning on this technology, and all these workloads are mostly going to come to India,” Davit Baghdasaryan, cofounder 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-I, -II and -III 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 said.

As per a survey by IT services body 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. Sixty-one per cent of the sample size in the survery report over a 20 per cent reduction in cost per eligible interaction, showing that efficiency gains are already visible for many organisations. Thirty per cent of scaled organisations also report a positive impact on their revenue. 

For example, Krisp’s technology can already translate 12 Indian languages properly, while six more are being refined to make it better. Most of this are used in call centres across healthcare, retail, telecom and financial services. 

“Earlier, the 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 neutralisation 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.