Meta launches AI model for language translation

Alex Omenye

Facebook’s parent company Meta on Tuesday launched an AI model that can translate and transcribe speech in a wide range of languages.

This serves as a possible cornerstone for products that enable real-time communication across language barriers.

The company claimed in a blog post that their SeamlessM4T model could combine technology that was previously only accessible in separate models to provide translations between text and speech in roughly 100 languages as well as complete speech-to-speech translation for 35 languages.

According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, these technologies will help users from all over the world communicate in the metaverse, a collection of interconnected virtual worlds, on which he is pinning the company’s future.

According to the blog post, Meta is making the model available to the general public for non-commercial use.

Zuckerberg claims that Meta benefits from an open AI ecosystem because it stands to gain more from essentially crowdsourcing the development of user-facing tools for its social platforms rather than by charging for access to the models.

In a research publication, Meta researchers claimed that they had collected audio training data for the SeamlessM4T model using 4 million hours of “raw audio originating from a publicly available repository of crawled web data,” without identifying the repository in question.

This year, the largest social media platform in the world published a flurry of primarily free AI models, including a sizable language model named Llama that directly competes with OpenAI’s and Alphabet’s Google’s proprietary models.