Meta releases more advanced AI-powered language translator

Details: The engine, known as Seamless M4T, is being released under a Creative Commons license allowing researchers and developers to build upon Meta's work.

By the numbers: Seamless M4T supports:

• Speech recognition for nearly 100 languages.
• Speech-to-text translation for nearly 100 input and output languages.
• Speech-to-speech translation, supporting nearly 100 input languages and 36 output languages.
• Text-to-text translation for nearly 100 languages.
• Text-to-speech translation, supporting nearly 100 input languages and 35 output languages.

What they're saying: Paco Guzmán, a research scientist manager at Meta, told Axios that a big breakthrough with Seamless M4T is that it doesn't rely on intermediate models to produce results, which allows it to be more nimble.

• "It even supports changing languages on the fly," Guzmán said. "This allows [it] to better support populations who naturally mix languages in their day-to-day speech."

The big picture: Google has also done a lot of work in language translation products and research.

• Among its latest efforts is AudioPaLM, which combines two language models in an effort to let intonation and other speech characteristics come through even in translation

Flashback: Meta last year released No Language Left Behind, a text-to-text translation engine, followed by its Universal Speech Translator, a speech-to-speech translation system that supported Hokkien, a language without a widely used writing system.