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These translations have publicly available audio recordings of people reading these texts in different languages. To overcome this, we turned to religious texts, such as the Bible, that have been translated in many different languages and whose translations have been widely studied for text-based language translation research. Our ApproachĬollecting audio data for thousands of languages was our first challenge because the largest existing speech datasets cover 100 languages at most. We’re open-sourcing our models and code so that others in the research community can build on our work and help preserve the world’s languages and bring the world closer together. There are also many use cases for speech technology - from virtual and augmented reality technology to messaging services - that can be used in a person’s preferred language and can understand everyone’s voice. Massively Multilingual Speech (MMS) models expand text-to-speech and speech-to-text technology from around 100 languages to more than 1,100 - more than 10 times as many as before - and can also identify more than 4,000 spoken languages, 40 times more than before. We want to make it easier for people to access information and use devices in their preferred language, and today we’re announcing a series of artificial intelligence (AI) models that could help them do just that. Many of the world’s languages are in danger of disappearing, and the limitations of current speech recognition and generation technology will only accelerate this trend.
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