Meta AI is announcing a long-term effort to build language and MT tools that will include most of the world’s languages. This includes two new projects. The first is No Language Left Behind, where we are building a new advanced AI model that can learn from languages with fewer examples to train from, and we will use it to enable expert-quality translations in hundreds of languages, ranging from Asturian to Luganda to Urdu. The second is Universal Speech Translator, where we are designing novel approaches to translating from the speech in one language to another in real-time so we can support languages without a standard writing system as well as those that are both written and spoken.
It will take much more work to provide everyone around the world with truly universal translation tools. But we believe the efforts described here are an important step forward. Sharing details and open-sourcing our code and models in the future means that others can build on our work and bring us closer to achieving this important goal.
