Meta unveils speech-to-text, text-to-speech AI models for over 1,100 languages; even shares open source data

tech.hindustantimes.com:

All the tech majors are in a fierce fight over delivering utility to users in the form of artificial intelligence (AI) boosted products. While everyone knows about OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard, there was very little available on it from Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Platforms. Till today, that is. Now, the company has launched its speech-to-text, text-to-speech AI models for over 1,100 languages and the best part is that it is not linked to ChatGPT. Check out the Massively Multilingual Speech (MMS) project.

The biggest takeaway is that Meta has shared the open source and that means it could lead to a skyrocketing of the number of speech apps created across the world.

If all goes well in the real world, how useful this can be is clear from Meta's statement, "Existing speech recognition models only cover approximately 100 languages — a fraction of the 7,000+ known languages spoken on the planet."

Now, good machine-learning models require large amounts of labeled data — in this case, many thousands of hours of audio, along with transcriptions. For most languages, this data simply does not exist.

However, Meta has overcome that through its MMS project, which combined wav2vec 2.0, its pioneering work in self-supervised learning, and a new dataset that provides labeled data for over 1,100 languages and unlabeled data for nearly 4,000 languages.

Patting itself on the back, Meta, in a statement said, "Our results show that the Massively Multilingual Speech models outperform existing models and cover 10 times as many languages."

It also revealed that, "Today, we are publicly sharing our models and code so that others in the research community can build upon our work. Through this work, we hope to make a small