Facebook Announces Plans To Build ‘Universal Speech Translator’

Meta, formally known as Facebook, is going to build an artificially intelligent “universal speech translator.”

This week, Meta, which owns Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook, announced its plans to build a translation platform that would give “everyone in the world” the ability to translate any language.

“The ability to communicate with anyone in any language — that’s a superpower people have dreamed of forever, and AI is going to deliver that within our lifetimes,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg during an online presentation, The Verge reports. Zuckerberg says he plans to cover languages not often represented in language translation applications. The app will be able to translate languages in real-time and to translate using fewer training examples.

There’s no direct time frame for which the translation software will be finished by the company mentioned it’s planning.

“Eliminating language barriers would be profound, making it possible for billions of people to access information online in their native or preferred language,” Meta wrote in a blogpost.“Advances in [machine translation] won’t just help those people who don’t speak one of the languages that dominates the internet today; they’ll also fundamentally change the way people in the world connect and share ideas.”