“The dream of a Babel fish — the translating animal envisioned by classic science-fiction franchise The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — could be a bit closer to reality. Researchers at tech giant Meta have created a machine-learning system that almost instantaneously translates speech in 101 languages into words spoken by a voice synthesizer in any of 36 target languages.
The Massively Multilingual and Multimodal Machine Translation (SEAMLESSM4T) system can also translate speech to text, text to speech and text to text. The results are described in Nature on 15 January.
Meta, which is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, and runs social-media sites such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, says it is making SEAMLESSM4T available open-source for other researchers who want to build on it, following the success of releasing its LLaMA large language model to developers worldwide.”
From Nature.