Meta Expands AI Speech Recognition to 1,600+ Languages

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Willkommen. Bienvenue. Welcome. C’mon in. Meta has unveiled Omnilingual Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), an AI system that can transcribe speech in over 1,600 languages — including 500 low-resource languages that have never been handled by AI before.

The project represents the latest development from Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team and signals a major shift toward making speech technology open to all linguistic communities. Critics might argue that promoting a global language (i.e., English) would be a better use of our time, and perhaps lead to world harmony and more technological innovations.

Anyway, according to the announcement, the company has also open-sourced several key assets alongside the system: Omnilingual wav2vec 2.0 ...