Douglas Adams’ Babelfish concept just got much closer - Interview with Sharath Keshava Narayana of Sanas

Douglas Adams’ Babelfish concept just got much closer - Interview with Sharath Keshava Narayana of Sanas

Author: Adrian Swinscoe | Customer Experience Strategy Expert December 11, 2025 Duration: 35:07

Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast is with Sharath Keshava Narayana, CEO and Co-Founder of Sanas, which provides a real-time speech understanding platform with accent translation, noise cancellation and now real-time speech translation technology.

Sharath and I talk about the challenges with current translation methods, what they are doing with regards to real-time speech translation, the possibilities that this type of technology offers for customer service and experience and the exciting fact that Douglas Adams’ Babelfish application/device that featured in his book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is getting much closer. We also finish off with Sharath’s best advice, his Punk CX brand and his very own good news story.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Twilio’s secret sauce and CarFinance247’s road to success – Interviews from Twilio SIGNAL London 2025 – and is number 566 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.


There’s a lot of noise around customer experience, but Punk CX: Customer Experience Insights with Adrian Swinscoe cuts through it with conversations that feel more like a strategic workshop than a standard interview. Host Adrian Swinscoe, a customer experience strategy expert, brings a distinctively pragmatic and often contrarian perspective to each discussion. He sits down with a wide range of industry leaders, from entrepreneurs to seasoned executives, to unpack what it really takes to build an organization that people genuinely want to engage with. You’ll hear them delve into the interconnected mechanics of customer service, customer engagement, and the often-overlooked driver of it all: employee experience and engagement. The dialogue naturally explores how technology, from AI to broader digital transformation, can be leveraged practically rather than just hyped, and what it means to build adaptable, responsive organizations with high-performing teams at their core. This podcast moves beyond theory, focusing on the actionable insights and sometimes uncomfortable truths that define modern customer and business strategy. Each episode is designed to give you a tangible takeaway, whether you’re refining your own approach or challenging the status quo within your company.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 50

Punk CX: Customer Experience Insights with Adrian Swinscoe
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