The research and further development of artificial intelligence is particularly important for large tech companies. Now Meta is introducing SeamlessM4T, an AI translator that can translate almost 100 languages.
Be it Google Translate or DeepL – platforms that translate various languages have become an integral part of the Internet. Facebook parent Meta also wants to further develop translations and has now introduced the AI SeamlessM4T.
The company wants to “bring the world closer together” with its “fundamental multimodal model” for translating languages, according to the blog post accompanying the publication of the AI.
What can SeamlessM4T from Meta do?
The name SeamlessM4T stands for “Massively Multilingual and Multimodal Machine Translation”. Meta itself describes AI as “a fundamental multilingual and multitasking model that seamlessly translates and transcribes speech and text.” The model is currently available as a demo.
The AI can automatically recognize almost 100 languages and translate written and spoken language into writing. In 36 languages, including English, SeamlessM4T can even transmit the translation via voice output. The software can also detect language changes – even if the change occurs in the middle of a sentence.
SeamlessM4T is freely available
Meta makes its AI translator freely available for non-commercial purposes. The group wants to give researchers and developers the opportunity to build on the work they have already done.
For this purpose, the tech company also provides the metadata of the SeamlessAlign translation data set. According to Meta, this includes a total of 270,000 hours of evaluated language and text alignments and is therefore the “largest open multimodal translation data set to date”.
How does meta deal with bias issues
Like other AI systems, SeamlessM4T runs the risk of the model “misrepresenting the input or producing toxic or inaccurate results.”
Gender-specific distortions are also possible. According to Meta’s testing data, SeamlessM4T tends to translate words into the masculine form or translate worse if a feminine form was previously used.
Meta wants to continue researching security and “continuously improve” SeamlessM4T. The goal is to reduce such cases when using AI.
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Source: https://www.basicthinking.de/blog/2023/08/23/meta-ki-seamlessm4t/
