Meta Has Developed AI for Real-Time Translation of Hokkien

Meta is chugging along on their Universal Speech Translator, which hopes to train an artificial intelligence to translate hundreds of languages in real time. Today, the tech giant claims to have generated the first artificial intelligence to translate Hokkien, which is a language primarily spoken and not written. Hokkien is a language that is spoken by approximately 49 million people in countries like China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Phillippines. Typically, training an AI to understand human speech--and in Meta's case, translation--researchers will feed the computer a large dataset of written transcripts. But Meta says that Hokkien is once of nearly 3,500 languages that are primarily spoken, meaning Hokkien does not have a large enough dataset to train the artificial intelligence since the language does not have a unified writing system.