Meta and UNESCO Join Forces to Enhance Translation Artificial Intelligence.

Meta has established a collaboration with UNESCO to implement a new plan aimed at improving artificial intelligence in translation and voice recognition. Within its Language Technology Partner Program, Meta is seeking partners willing to contribute a minimum of 10 hours of voice recordings with transcripts, extensive written texts of over 200 sentences, as well as sets of translated sentences. The goal of this initiative is to focus efforts on "underrepresented languages, in support of UNESCO's work," as stated in a release from Meta itself.

So far, the collaboration has included the government of Nunavut, a northern territory in Canada, with the aim of developing translation systems for the Indigenous languages used in the region: Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun. Meta highlighted that its efforts are particularly directed towards less-represented languages, thereby supporting UNESCO's work under the International Decade of Indigenous Languages.

As part of this program, Meta has launched an open-source translation testbed named BOUQuET, which will serve as a standard for evaluating the performance of artificial intelligence models in translation tasks. This tool will consist of sentences "carefully crafted by linguistic experts," and contributions are invited on a dedicated site for this purpose.

The company has shown renewed interest in translation through artificial intelligence for both text and voice, which makes sense for a company connecting users on a global scale. Last year, Meta introduced a tool that allows automatic translation of Reels into different languages with lip-syncing, promising to implement this feature in some English and Spanish creator videos in the U.S. initially. Over time, Meta has expanded its artificial intelligence assistant, which is now available in 43 countries and more than a dozen languages.