In its quest to develop AI that can understand a range of different dialects, Meta has created an AI model, SeamlessM4T, that can translate and transcribe close to 100 languages across text and speech. Available in open source along with SeamlessAlign, a new translation data set, Meta claims that SeamlessM4T represents a “significant breakthrough” in the field of AI-powered speech-to-speech and speech-to-text. “Our single model provides on-demand translations that enable people who speak different languages to communicate more effectively,” Meta writes in a blog post shared with TechCrunch. “SeamlessM4T implicitly recognizes the source languages without the need for a separate language identification model.” SeamlessM4T is something of a spiritual successor to Meta’s No Language Left Behind, a text-to-text machine translation model, and Universal Speech Translator, one of the few direct speech-to-speech translation systems to support the Hokkien language. And it builds on Massively Multilingual Speech, Meta’s framework that provides speech recognition, language identification and speech synthesis tech across more than 1,100 languages. Meta isn’t the only one investing resources in developing sophisticated AI translation and transcription tools.
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