Social media conglomerate Meta has created a single AI model capable of translating across 200 different languages, including many not supported by recent commercial tools. The agency is open sourcing the project in the hopes that others will build on its work. The AI version is part of an ambitious R&D project by Meta to create a so-called universal speech translator which the agency sees as important for growth across its many platforms from Facebook and Instagram to developing domains like VR and AR.
Machine translation not only permits Meta to better understand its users and so improve the marketing systems that generate 97 percent of its revenue, but could also be the foundation of a killer app for future projects like its amplified reality glasses. Experts in machine translation told that Meta new research was determined and thorough, but noted that the quality of some of the model translations would likely be well below that of better supported languages like Italian or German.
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The major donation, here is the data, professor Alexander an expert in computational and linguistic at LMU Munich in Germany. What are significant are 100 latest languages that can be translated by Meta model. Meta achievements stem somewhat inconsistently from both the scope and focus of its research. While most machine translation version handles only a handful of languages Meta version is all encapsulating it’s a single system able to translate in more than 40,000 different directions between 200 different languages.
But Meta is also interested in including low resource languages in the model languages with fewer than 1 million publicly obtainable translated sentence pairs. These include many African and Indian languages not usually supported by profit-making machine and translation tools. It’s everyone globally and so we’re really interested in supporting these types of community efforts.
