Meta, a company under the umbrella of Facebook, Instagram, Oculus and WhatsApp, has announced an ambitious new research project on artificial intelligence to create translation software that works for "everyone in the world", basically a universal voice translator based on AI.
"The ability to communicate with anyone in any language: it's a superpower that people have always dreamed of and AI will deliver it to us in our lifetime," said Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, during the streaming event ' Meta Inside the Lab: Building the metaverse with AI '.
The project was announced at an event focusing on the wide range of benefits that Meta believes AI can deliver to the metaverse the company is building.
The company says that although commonly spoken languages such as English, Mandarin and Spanish are well handled by current translation tools, around 20% of the world's population does not speak languages covered by these systems.
So he wants to overcome these challenges by implementing new machine learning techniques in two specific areas.
The first project is called No Language Left Behind and will focus on creating artificial intelligence models that can learn to translate language using fewer examples.
The second, Universal Speech Translator,
'The elimination of language barriers would be profound, allowing billions of people to access information online in their native or preferred language,' explained the researchers at the event, but not giving a time for these projects to complete.
