Meta has launched a new program in collaboration with UNESCO. This program will focus on collecting speech recordings and written texts through AI systems in the future. The program, called the Language Technology Partner Program, invites partners to provide 10 hours of speech recordings, transcriptions, large texts, and translated sentences. Meta will use this data in AI’s speech recognition and translation models. Once these models are completed, they will be made available as open source for everyone to use.
One of the program's participants is the government of Nunavut, a territory in Canada where some residents speak Inuit languages. Meta indicates that the program will focus on underserved languages and support UNESCO's work. The goal is to create intelligent systems that can understand human needs across different languages.
Meta is also introducing an open-source tool to evaluate the performance of machine translation models. This tool, composed of sentences crafted by linguists, supports seven languages and is available on the AI development platform Hugging Face, where anyone can contribute.
While Meta emphasizes the collaborative nature of this initiative, it will also enhance its own AI models.
