Meta-UNESCO Partnership to Boost AI-Powered Language Tech

Meta has launched a new program (The Language Technology Partner Program) with UNESCO to enhance AI-driven speech recognition and translation.

Key Points

• The Language Technology Partner Program will collect speech recordings, transcriptions, written texts, and translated sentences in various languages.
• Meta is working with partners who can provide at least 10 hours of speech data and large text collections.
• The Nunavut government in Canada, where Inuktut is spoken, is one of the first contributors.
• Meta has also introduced an open-source machine translation benchmark to assess AI translation models.
• This benchmark is available on the Hugging Face platform, allowing researchers and developers to access and contribute to it using linguist-crafted sentences in seven languages.

Background

Meta has been adding AI language tools across its platforms. Last September, it launched an automatic voice translation feature for Instagram Reels, letting creators dub their speech and sync lip movements in different languages.

Now, Meta’s new partnership with UNESCO is working on the Language Technology Partner Program to break language barriers using AI.

With these efforts, Meta is becoming a leader in AI-powered multilingual content and accessibility.

News Gist

Meta has partnered with UNESCO to launch the Language Technology Partner Program, aiming to improve AI-driven speech recognition and translation.

The program gathers speech and text data from various languages, with contributors like Nunavut’s government.

Meta also introduced an open-source translation benchmark on Hugging Face to enhance AI model evaluation.