Meta Launches AI-Powered Translator and Transcription Tool

Meta has launched an “all-in-one” multilingual AI translation and transcription model. Called SeamlessM4T, the model allows users to carry out different tasks such as speech-to-text, speech-to-speech, text-to-speech, and text-to-text translations.

Meta says the tool will help people communicate effortlessly through speech and text across multiple languages. Depending on the task, the language model supports up to 100 languages.

“The world we live in has never been more interconnected, giving people access to more multilingual content than ever before. This also makes the ability to communicate and understand information in any language increasingly important,” Meta wrote in a post announcing the product on Tuesday.

SeamlessM4T is available to developers and other organizations under a research license.

Meta is also opening access to the metadata of SeamlessAlign, a multimodal translation database with 270,000 hours worth of mined speech and text alignments. The company says it is the biggest open translation database in existence.

The announcement signals Meta’s continued effort to become a favorite among AI researchers and developers. Last month, the company publicly released Llama2, an open source large language model. And recent reports claim that Meta is planning to introduce an open source AI coding assistance which enables developers to generate programming code automatically.

“This is only the latest step in our ongoing effort to build AI-powered technology that helps connect people across languages,” Meta wrote in its SeamlessM4T announcement post. 

“In the future, we want to explore how this foundational model can enable new communication capabilities — ultimately bringing us closer to a world where everyone can be understood.”