Ryan Thompson was enjoying his morning coffee when the phone rang. The caller ID said “Wells Fargo Bank” and it had a familiar phone number so he picked it up.
The caller identified himself as a fraud analyst working from the banks Concord California operations center. He spoke with an American accent and advised that there were some unauthorized charges on his credit card account.
Only after losing $3,000 did Ryan discover he had fallen victim to a scammer operating from a call center in India, using new AI technology to disguise their accent and some of the tell-tale signs of scams that Ryan was used to.
A New Powerful AI Is Able To Mask Accents – Sanas.AI
A new and powerful AI technology called Sanas.AI out of Palo Alto California has just received a $13 million investment from Teleperformance, the largest call center in the world. Teleperformance plans to use the technology in their calls centers in India and the Philippines.
Sanas.AI is able to “neutralize” accents of call center representatives in to make the agents sound more familiar to Western customers – a feature some fear could be co-opted by fraudsters.
Teleperformance provides outsourced customer support to major global companies including Apple Inc., ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok, and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.
Scams Could Be Harder To Detect Without The Audible Clues
The technology doesn’t just modify accents—it also eliminates background noise like “crowing roosters, ambulance sirens and office chatter.”
These ambient sounds have previously helped potential victims recognize when callers weren’t actually in the claimed locations. In fact this happened to me. Two years ago I received a call from IRS agent with a heavy accent while I could swear someone was washing dishes in the background.
With Sanas, these audible cues could simply disappear as the AI will make the caller sound local and that they are actually calling from a professional environment.
Watch The Demo
To see how well the AI works, you can watch a demo of how well the AI works.
