The company announced this week at one of its corporate conferences that it intends to expand its offering in the field of AI (artificial intelligence), so that applications using this technology can support up to 1 000 languages currently used in the world.
It is estimated that there are just over 7,000 people worldwide. languages. As the commitment is extremely ambitious, the implementation of this project is likely to take many years and other languages will be supported successively. The company has already developed a universal language model capable of handling around 400 languages. It is a software called USM (Universal Speech Model), which so far has no equal in terms of the number of supported languages.
The American tech giant is also working with communities around the world to get data on different languages. This recently led to the company adding 24 more languages to its AI platform, as well as enabling document creation through the Gboard app after hearing nine more African languages.
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Google also cooperates with non-governmental organizations, local governments and scientific institutions, collecting from them sound samples of various language dialects used in a given region. Other big tech companies are also building their own language models. For example, in the middle of this year, Meta introduced the SI language model called No Language Left Behind, which supports 200 languages.
Meta’s efforts in this area are aimed at bringing the technology more broadly to its social network. The model developed by Meta covers up to 55 African languages. This is a great achievement because currently widely used translation tools only support about 20 African languages.
