Meta Launches New Program to Improve AI Speech and Translation Models With UNESCO

Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team has announced a new program aimed at enhancing and expanding machine translation and speech recognition, particularly for underserved languages. In collaboration with UNESCO, Meta is expanding its support for linguistic diversity through open-source AI models and research.

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Meta’s New Initiative for Linguistic Diversity

To achieve the same, Meta announced on Friday the launch of the new Language Technology Partner Programme, which aims to find partners to collaborate on advancing and expanding its open-source language technologies, including AI translation technologies. Meta is particularly focusing efforts on underserved languages, supporting UNESCO’s work as part of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages.

Partners Contribution

Partners will contribute speech recordings, transcriptions, and translated text to help improve AI-driven speech recognition and machine translation models. The Government of Nunavut, Canada, has already joined the initiative, providing data for the Inuit languages Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun. Participants will also gain access to technical workshops led by Meta’s researchers.

“We are looking for partners who can contribute 10+ hours of speech recordings with transcriptions, large amounts of written text (200+ sentences) and sets of translated sentences in diverse languages,” Meta said on February 7, 2025. The company added that partners will work with its teams to help integrate these languages into AI-driven speech recognition and machine translation models, which, when released, will be open source and freely available to the community.