like most other big tech companies meta has been betting big on artificial intelligence ai the companys approach to ai has been a bit different than the likes of google and microsoft meta unveiled a new large language model llm with the aim of preserving the worlds languages called massively multilingual speech mms the model expands texttospeech and speechtotext technology from around 100 languages to more than 1100 more than 10 times as many as before and can also identify more than 4000 spoken languages 40 times more than beforehow will the model be usedaccording to a blog post by meta many of the worlds languages are in danger of disappearing and the limitations of current speech recognition and generation technology will only accelerate this trend we want to make it easier for people to access information and use devices in their preferred language and today were announcing a series of artificial intelligence ai models that could help them do just that the company said in the blog post how will the model workmeta said that the biggest challenge was collecting audio data for thousands of languages the largest existing speech datasets cover 100 languages at most explained meta for example religious texts such as the bible have been translated into many different languages and whose translations have been widely studied for textbased language translation research meta had these translations have publicly available audio recordings of people reading these texts in different languages as part of the mms project we created a dataset of readings of the new testament in more than 1100 languages which provided on average 32 hours of data per language the company said meta then considered unlabeled recordings of various other christian religious readings and increased the number of languages available to more than 4000 while this data is from a specific domain and is often read by male speakers our analysis shows that our models perform equally well for male and female voices and while the content of the audio recordings is religious our analysis shows that this doesnt bias the model to produce more religious language the company said