Facebook and Instagram's owner, Meta, has announced series of artificial intelligence (AI) models that can identify more than 4,000 spoken languages, 40 times more than before.
"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," the company said on its website.
It has open-sourced its 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.
"In the future, we want to increase MMS's coverage to support even more languages, and also tackle the challenge of handling dialects, which is often difficult for existing speech technology," Meta said.
