Meta unveils all-in-one AI model for speech and text translations
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Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) introduced what it called the first all-in-one multimodal and multilingual artificial intelligence, or AI, translation model called SeamlessM4T.
The single model can perform speech-to-text, speech-to-speech, text-to-speech, and text-to-text translations for up to 100 languages depending on the task, the company added.
SeamlessM4T supports speech-to-speech translation for about 100 input languages and 36 (including English) output languages.
The tech giant said it publicly releasing SeamlessM4T under a research license to allow researchers and developers to build on this work.
The company is also releasing the metadata of SeamlessAlign, the biggest open multimodal translation dataset to date, with a total of 270,000 hours of mined speech and text alignments, according to Meta.
The Facebook parent noted that SeamlessM4T builds on advancements the company and others made over the years in an effort to create a universal translator.
Last year, Meta released a text-to-text machine translation model known as No Language Left Behind, which supports 200 languages; and earlier this year unveiled Massively Multilingual Speech, which provides speech recognition, language identification and speech synthesis technology in over 1,100 languages.
Meta has launched several other AI models as well. Earlier this month, the company introduced its open-source AI tool called AudioCraft which enables users to generate audio and music from text prompts. In July, the company launched Llama 2, in collaboration with Microsoft (MSFT), for free research and commercial use.
Companies around the world have launched their own large language models, or LLMsâ Baidu's (BIDU) Ernie Bot, Alibaba's (BABA) Tongyi Qianwen and Tongyi Wanxiang, Google's (GOOG) (GOOGL) Bard, OpenAI's DALL-E, Midjourney Inc.'s Midjourney, are some of them.
However, the potential risks posed by the new technology have also not gone unnoticed. The U.N. Security Council held its first formal meeting on the risks linked to the use of AI in July. Seven companies â including tech giants Amazon (AMZN), Google, Meta and Microsoft â have made voluntary commitments to the White House to implement certain measures for the safe use of AI.

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