Facebook Ramps Up Open Source Drive Into Speech Translation

Facebook continues to pour considerable resources into machine translation (MT); but, as evidenced by a recent Thai translation snafu, language technology remains a major challenge for the social media giant. In addition to improving quality estimation and various other initiatives, Facebook is currently working on two others that share information with the broader open source community, allowing developers to improve the technology. In a July 2020 blog post, Facebook AI made available CoVoST V2, a "massively multilingual" speech-to-text translation dataset. The original CoVoST was built on Mozilla's Common Voice, a database of crowdsourced voice recordings. This new version boasts 2,900 hours of speech, as well as speech translation data from 21 languages into English and from English into 15 languages.