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Meta wants you to learn all the languages ​​in the world using AI

The Meta group is interested in the role of AI in the metaverse, it could in particular be used to translate exchanges between users.

The Facebook group, renamed Meta, has always been at the top of the technology news in recent weeks. If this change of name had allowed Mark Zuckerberg’s company to make the group one of the stars of the metaverse, now the latter does not stop making announcements, each more unexpected than the other.

Indeed, the Meta group announces that it wants to use its knowledge of artificial intelligence to develop a tool capable of live translating any text or audio into all the languages ​​of the world. The idea would therefore be to make a giant translator, more powerful than all the systems currently in place around the world, and which would be able to learn by itself with AI.

This idea of ​​a universal translator could very well stick to the great project of Meta, which plans to place humanity in a virtual universe and thus to have people, separated by several thousand kilometers, discuss simultaneously, in the same space and the everything, in a language that everyone can understand.

Making translation possible for everyone

If Meta explains in its announcement that the most popular languages ​​such as English, Mandarin or Spanish are already very well translated by current systems, the group explains that 20% of the world’s population does not speak any of these three. languages, and therefore these people can hardly communicate with the rest of the world.

Meta also explains that these languages, relatively unknown, do not have a large enough written and translated corpus to be able to train an AI. It will therefore be necessary to speak to the latter to train her, so that she speaks these new languages ​​better and better. In order to succeed in doing all this as quickly as possible, Meta hopes to be able to put two new learning systems in place.

The first, baptized No Language Left Behind should allow AIs to understand a language based on a very small amount of database. The other system that the group wishes to set up, called Universal Speech Translator, is undoubtedly the most ambitious system.

A 100% oral translation, a detail that changes everything

Meta hopes that the latter will be able to translate a language directly from an audio without having to transcribe what is said. Today translation services ask either to write the text that needs to be translated, or else they rewrite the words heard in order to translate them with a very slight latency into a second language. For example, this is how Google’s translation system works. It is possible to speak to the latter, who will transcribe what he hears, before translating it.

Meta wants the translation to be instantaneous and for this transcription step to disappear from the work chain. This would make the translation faster, and therefore the conversation smoother.

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