During Meta’s latest series of virtual Inside the Lab events, Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the company is currently working on a “universal voice translation system” allowing people around the world to instantly communicate with each other in different languages.
Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and even Messenger, wants to break down language barriers. Indeed, Mark Zuckerberg has announced a new ambitious artificial intelligence research project to create translation software which works for ” everyone in the world “.
Meta’s ambition is to make this universal voice translator available to users in the metaverse. It would allow them to communicate in the metaverse in different languages using instant and simultaneous voice translation. This reminds us of other projects that had emerged in the past, including The Pilot, an in-ear device allowing instant translation of all languages. Amazon had even gone further, since the company had announced that it wanted to allow you to speak to your animals through a translator.
Meta wants to break down the language barrier in its metaverse
” The ability to communicate with anyone in any language is a superpower people have always dreamed of, and AI is going to give it to us in our lifetime. “, announces Mark Zuckerberg. Meta’s goal is clear : facilitate communication between users from different countries.
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However, according to Meta, 20% of the world’s population does not speak the languages that are already present on current translation tools, and that underrepresented languages do not have the necessary written repositories training AI systems.
To solve this problem, Meta has announced that it is working on a first project called “No Language Left Behind”. This one will focus on building AI models that can learn to translate a language using fewer training examples. In other words, it will allow this ambitious system to learn all languages and dialects, even if these are rare and poorly documented.
