Tech giant Meta is partnering with UNESCO on a new AI project. Facebook’s parent company is reportedly collecting speech recordings and transcriptions so that it can develop a new AI that will be openly available.
“Our efforts are especially focused on underserved languages, in support of UNESCO’s work,” Meta wrote in a blog post provided to TechCrunch. “Ultimately, our goal is to create intelligent systems that can understand and respond to complex human needs, regardless of language or cultural background.”
AI in speech and translation focuses on enabling machines to process, understand, and generate human language. Speech recognition converts spoken language into text, while text-to-speech (TTS) generates spoken language from written text. These technologies are used in voice assistants like Siri and Alexa. Voice synthesis allows AI to clone voices, and emotion detection can identify emotional tone through speech, benefiting customer service and mental health monitoring.
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In translation, AI systems like Google Translate use neural machine translation (NMT) for more accurate and natural translations. Speech translation combines speech recognition and translation for real-time communication, breaking down language barriers in meetings or customer service. AI models can also personalize translations based on context, tone, or dialect.
These advancements have applications in global communication, accessibility, customer support, and content creation, making AI an essential tool for bridging language and speech gaps worldwide.
Reportedly, the program, the Language Technology Partner Program, is seeking collaborators who can contribute more than 10 hours of speech recordings with transcriptions, large amounts of written text, and sets of translated sentences in “diverse languages.”
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Though on the face of it, this latest project sounds like an altruistic effort on the part of the tech company, but Meta does stand to profit in the future from the data collected from this project to develop a better speech recognition and translation AI model.