During Meta‘s latest Inside the Lab virtual event series, Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the company is currently working on a “universal speech translation system” allowing people around the world to instantaneously communicate with one other using different languages.
“The ability to communicate with anyone in any language, that’s a superpower people have dreamed of forever, and AI is going to deliver that within our lifetimes,” said Zuckerberg.
Meta’s plan for the project comes in two parts. The first initiative is dubbed “No Language Left Behind,” which will build AI models that learn to translate languages using fewer inputs and training examples. “We are creating a single model that can translate hundreds of languages with state-of-the-art results and most of the language pairs, everything from Austrian to Uganda to Urdu,” said Zuckerberg. While the major languages such as English, Mandarin, and Spanish have access to advanced translation technologies, the lesser-used native languages of billions of people around the world don’t have the same luxury, hence the name of Meta’s solution “No Language Left Behind.”
The second part is the Universal Speech Translator, a real-time system that directly translates speech from one language to another without the need for a written intermediary. This will allow spoken languages without a standard writing system to be better supported.
Meta envisions these new technologies to be incorporated into an app for future wearable devices as well as VR and AR spaces.
“Eliminating language barriers would be profound, making it possible for billions of people to access information online in their native or preferred language,” Meta wrote in a blog post. “Advances in Machine Technology won’t just help those people who don’t speak one of the languages that dominate the internet today; they’ll also fundamentally change the way people in the world connect and share ideas.”
With other tech giants such as Google and Apple developing similar technologies, Meta is faced with the challenge of creating a system that’s more reliable and user-friendly than its competitors while garnering the trust of its users whose conversations will flow through Meta’s servers.
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