Meta Developed AI to Translate Hokkien in Real-Time
October 21, 2022 By Fakun Gram
(Image Credit Google)
The Universal Speech Translator, developed by Meta, is making progress toward its goal of teaching artificial intelligence to translate between hundreds of languages in real time. Additionally, the tech giant claims to have created the first artificial intelligence to translate Hokkien, a language mostly spoken and not written.
In nations including China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines, about 49 million people speak Hokkien. Researchers typically feed the computer a sizable dataset of textual transcripts when teaching an AI to understand human speech, and in Meta's case, translation.
However,
according to Meta, Hokkien is one of almost 3,500 languages that people primarily speak than write. Hence, the language lacks a sufficient dataset for artificial intelligence training. As a result, as stated in the company's press statement,
Meta concentrated on a speech-to-speech strategy.
Furthermore, Meta clarified, without going into great detail, that their engineers converted input speech into a series of acoustic noises. Then, they utilized them to produce the language's waveforms. After that, they combined those waveforms with Mandarin, which Meta classifies as a "related language."
Moreover, according to Meta, the Hokkien translator is still a work in progress as
artificial intelligence can only translate one sentence at a time. But, it has been made available as open-source so that other researchers can expand on the company's research.
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What's more
Additionally, the company is also releasing SpeechMatrix, which is a "large collection of speech-to-speech translations developed through our innovative natural language processing toolkit."
Lastly, the history of Meta's attempts to develop technology that can comprehend human language is a little shaky. The business launched BlenderBot 3 earlier this year to demonstrate its attempt to develop an AI chatbot. The only thing we know so far about it is that the bot really wants people to know that racism is horrible and that one of her favorite movies was Mean Girls.
By Fakun Gram
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