NAB
What the metaverse needs is a small bright yellow fish that
can be placed in someone’s ear in order for them to be able to hear any
language translated into their first language. The Babelfish from Douglas
Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (via Genesis
11:1-9) is what Meta is working on to fulfil Mark Zuckerberg’s (god-like)
vision of social virtual reality and the metaversian concept of an internet
without borders.
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Zuckerberg revealed that Meta is working on building an
AI-powered “universal speech translator” that will work for everyone in the
digital world. This project aims at streamlining the interactions of users who
speak different languages in the digital universe with the help of AI.
“The goal here is instantaneous speech-to-speech translation
across all languages, even those that are mostly spoken; the ability to
communicate with anyone in any language,” Zuckerberg said during Meta’s “Building
for the metaverse with AI” presentation. “That’s a superpower that people
dreamed of forever and AI is going to deliver that within our lifetimes.”
According to Meta, 20% of the world’s population does not
speak languages covered by current translation tools. For the other
under-represented languages, they’ll be difficult for AI tools to learn since
there aren’t enough written scripts for the machine learning algorithms.
The universal language translator plan Meta is working to
instill will be executed in two parts. First, they’re developing a “No Language
Left Behind” program — a translation system capable of learning every spoken
language, even if there isn’t much text available to learn from.
“We are creating a single model that can translate hundreds
of languages with state-of-the-art results and most of the language pairs,
everything from Austrian to Uganda to Urdu,” Zuckerberg said during the live
stream.
Meta then aims to create an AI Babelfish, a universal speech
translator that aims to build systems that directly translate speech in real-time
from one language to another without the need for an intermediary written
component.
“However, data scarcity is the greatest obstacle for Meta
when it comes to translation tools,” CNBC TV18 notes. “The current
systems for text translations rely on learning from millions of sentences of
annotated data. Therefore, only a handful of languages that dominate the web
are available for translation. Expanding to other languages creates a need to find
ways to acquire and use training examples from languages with a sparse web
presence.”
With these projects, Meta aims to improve translations so
that people who speak different or even lesser-known languages can socialize in
Metaverse.
Petr Malyukov, a serial IT entrepreneur and CEO/cofounder of
YOUS, believes AI translation could help save language diversity, he
tells VentureBeat.
“It motivates people to keep preserving their native
languages because it no longer will be a barrier for international
communications,” he writes. “In the future, there will be no need to learn a
foreign language to be a part of the international community.
“It takes a lot of work before we get there, of course.
Meta’s universal speech translator has to learn hundreds of languages and
achieve the ability to translate from one to another in real-time.
“The engineers standing behind the project need to find training
data, which is not easy to get for many languages that are not popular on the
internet. It’s a complex and highly ambitious project, but it has enormous
potential to bring a lot of good to the world.”
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