Meta releases SeamlessM4T, a more advanced AI-powered language translator covering 100 languages

Named SeamlessM4T, Meta said it is the first all-in-one multilingual multimodal AI translation and transcription model. This single model can perform speech-to-text, speech-to-speech, text-to-speech, and text-to-text translations for up to 100 languages depending on the task.

New Delhi: Facebook parent company Meta on Tuesday released an AI-powered translation engine that can more easily translate languages across text and speech.

Named SeamlessM4T, Meta said it is the first all-in-one multilingual multimodal AI translation and transcription model. This single model can perform speech-to-text, speech-to-speech, text-to-speech, and text-to-text translations for up to 100 languages depending on the task.

"The world we live in has never been more interconnected, giving people access to more multilingual content than ever before. This also makes the ability to communicate and understand information in any language increasingly important," the company said as it announced SeamlessM4T.

SeamlessM4T, the first all-in-one multimodal and multilingual AI translation model that allows people to communicate through speech and text across different languages offers the following functionalities:

• 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 (including English) output languages
• Text-to-text translation for nearly 100 languages
• Text-to-speech translation, supporting nearly 100 input languages and 35 (including English) output languages

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"In keeping with our approach to open science, we’re publicly releasing SeamlessM4T under a research license to allow researchers and developers to build on this work. We’re also releasing the metadata of SeamlessAlign, the biggest open multimodal translation dataset to date, totaling 270,000 hours of mined speech and text alignments," Meta said.

Compared to approaches using separate models, SeamlessM4T’s single system approach reduces errors and delays, increasing the efficiency and quality of the translation process. This enables people who speak different languages to communicate with each other more effectively.

"SeamlessM4T builds on advancements we and others have made over the years in the quest to create a universal translator. Last year, we released No Language Left Behind (NLLB), a text-to-text machine translation model that supports 200 languages, and has since been integrated into Wikipedia as one of the translation providers. We also shared a demo of our Universal Speech Translator, which was the first direct speech-to-speech translation system for Hokkien, a language without a widely used writing system. And earlier this year, we revealed Massively Multilingual Speech, which provides speech recognition, language identification and speech synthesis technology across more than 1,100 languages," the company said.

SeamlessM4T, it said, was only the latest step in our ongoing effort to build AI-powered technology that helps connect people across languages. "In the future, we want to explore how this foundational model can enable new communication capabilities — ultimately bringing us closer to a world where everyone can be understood," Meta said.