Meta and UNESCO team up to improve translation AI

Meta has partnered with UNESCO on a new plan to improve translation and speech recognition AI, Techcrunch reported. As part of its Language Technology Partner Program, Meta is seeking collaborators willing to donate at least 10 hours of speech recordings with transcriptions, large written texts (200-plus sentences) and sets of translated sentences. The aim is to focus on “underserved languages, in support of UNESCO’s work,” Meta wrote in a blog post.

So far, Meta and UNESCO have signed on the government of Nunavut, a northern Canadian territory. The aim is to develop translation systems for the Intuit languages used there, Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun. “Our efforts are especially focused on underserved languages, in support of UNESCO’s work as part of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages,” Meta said.

As part of the program, Meta is releasing an open source translation benchmark called BOUQuET — a standard test to evaluate performance of AI models that do translation. It’ll be composed of sentences “carefully crafted by linguistic experts,” and is seeking contributions on a dedicated site.

Meta has taken a strong interest in AI translation for both text and speech, a logical move for a company that connects users around the world. Last year, it showed off a tool that uses AI to automatically dub Reels into other languages, complete with lip-sync, promising it would roll out to some creators videos in English and Spanish in the US first. The company has gradually expanded its Meta AI assistant around the world and it’s now available in 43 countries and over a dozen languages.