Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, the company that controls Facebook, wants to use artificial intelligence to break down linguistic barriers all around the world (AI). Meta has announced an ambitious AI-driven initiative that will be critical in the development of the Metaverse. According to the company, it is developing a universal speech translator as well as an AI-powered virtual assistant.
“The capacity to interact with anyone in any language — that’s a capability people have dreamed of forever, and AI is going to give that within our lifetimes,” Zuckerberg said in an online presentation.
Building for the metaverse, according to the business, will necessitate big AI breakthroughs. The first step is to promote inclusion through the use of language and translation.
Meta AI is announcing a long-term endeavor to construct language and machine translation capabilities that will cover the majority of the world’s languages, according to the company. Two more projects have been added to the mix. “We will use it to enable expert-quality translations in hundreds of languages, ranging from Asturian to Luganda to Urdu,” claimed the corporation, “and we will use it to enable expert-quality translations in hundreds of languages, ranging from Asturian to Luganda to Urdu.”
The second project is the Universal Speech Translator, in which Meta is developing unique methods for translating from one language’s speech to another in real-time, allowing it to serve languages that do not have a regular writing system as well as those that are both written and spoken.
For those who speak English, Mandarin, or Spanish, today’s apps and web tools may appear to already have the translation technology we require. Today, about half of the world’s population is unable to access online content in their native tongue. A single system capable of translating across all written languages is known as No Language Left Behind. In a blog post, the business stated, “We’re also working on Universal Speech Translator, an AI system that enables instantaneous speech-to-speech translation across all languages, even those that are largely spoken.”
Machine translation (MT) systems are fast improving, but they still rely significantly on learning from enormous volumes of textual data, therefore they don’t perform well for low-resource languages, such as those without training data or those lacking a standardized writing system, according to the business.
Project CAIRaoke is a novel way to artificial intelligence that powers chatbots and personal assistants. People may one day be able to have more fluid interactions with their virtual assistants because to this technology.
“Five years ago, we could translate across a dozen languages,” Zuckerberg said at the occasion. We were up to 30 languages three years ago, and we’re now aiming for hundreds this year.”
Despite being an ambitious project, Meta did not provide any timetables or milestones, which makes it much more confusing.
Furthermore, utilizing AI to break through language barriers is not a novel concept. Tech companies like Google and Apple have been working on this, and part of it includes translation tools. India has been working on a similar effort called the National Language Translation Mission, as has the Indian government (NLTM).
The goal of NLTM is to develop Speech to Speech Machine Translation and a Unified Language Interface (ULI) for translation of Indian languages, bringing together multiple projects in the field of Indic Language Technologies.
