Sanas, the buzzy Silicon Valley startup that wants to make the world sound whiter – By Joshua Bote (SFGate) / Aug 22, 2022
Silicon Valley startup Sanas has a lofty goal: to make call center workers sound white and American, no matter the country they’re from. And that’s just the beginning of their grand plan.
The voice tech company’s website features a photo of a smiling man, cropped so you only see a disembodied, toothy grin. Underneath the anonymous mouth, a demo invites you to “Hear the Magic” of Sanas. As you press play, you hear one side of a simulated conversation; a man with an Indian accent reads a familiarly tortured call center script about a missing package. Click the “With Sanas” slider, and the voice transforms instantly into something slightly robotic, a tad uncanny and unmistakably white.
Since its August 2021 launch, Sanas has been showered with funding by investors. Amid a trying time for the tech industry, the “accent translation” company — founded by three former Stanford students, Maxim Serebryakov, Shawn Zhang and Andrés Pérez Soderi — snagged a $32 million Series A funding round in June 2022, which they claim is the largest ever for a speech technology service. One press release boasts that investors who tried the service called it “magical.”
