You know how sci-fi movies depict this kind of universal translator that can decode and translate almost any language from other countries and even other totally different species without the user having any sort of prior knowledge of the language in question whatsoever?
Yeah, well Facebook looks to make something like that a reality, and soon. Facebook’s AI Research Team unveiled their latest work: an improved language translation system. RIght now, the process can translate up to 128 distinct languages into English, within a single application.
Say What Now?
Called XLS-R, the process is able to perform speech recognition, speech translation, and language identification (language tagging) at a rate higher than any other similar system. In short, it’s the current King of translation systems, or at least it will be once it becomes commercially available.
Facebook AI explains:
“Trained on more than 436,000 hours of publicly available speech recordings, XLS-R is based on wav2vec 2.0, our approach to self-supervised learning of speech representations. Utilizing speech data from different sources, ranging from parliamentary proceedings to audio books, we’ve expanded to 128 different languages, covering nearly two and a half times more languages than its predecessor.”
Facebook allegedly pitted the XLS-R against four major multilingual speech recognition benchmarks, in which it completely outclassed their results on most languages tested.
They go on further to say that:
“Specifically, we tried it on five languages of BABEL, 10 languages of CommonVoice, eight languages of MLS, and the 14 languages of VoxPopuli.”
The XLS-R was also tested for errors, which was still relatively high, but mainly due to the system’s novelty. In fact, the XLS-R shows marked improvement in accuracy, inching a few hairlines beyond the total error rates of previous iterations.
Facebook is currently working on developing its translation process, which could honestly lead to new opportunities with regards to cross-border connection, commerce, broader inter-market business comms, and even diplomacy.
The Wrap
Such systems would prove invaluable for progressing the Metaverse, which is all about connection and beyond. At most, Facebook is still developing the process, and it would still take quite some time seeing as how there are around 7,000 languages spoken in the world. Being ‘Universal’ means that all 7,000 are included in the translation catalogue, and 128 out of that means that, at most, the project covers around just 1% of the world’s language total. It’s not bad actually; at least it’s a start.
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