Research could bring automatic speech recognition to 2,000 languages

Only a fraction of the 7,000 to 8,000 languages spoken around the world benefit from modern language technologies like voice-to-text transcription, automatic captioning, instantaneous translation and voice recognition. Carnegie Mellon University researchers want to expand the number of languages with automatic speech recognition tools available to them from around 200 to potentially 2,000. "A lot of people in this world speak diverse languages, but language technology tools aren't being developed for all of them," said Xinjian Li, a Ph.D. student in the School of Computer Science's Language Technologies Institute (LTI). "Developing technology and a good language model for all people is one of the goals of this research." Li is part of a research team aiming to simplify the data requirements languages need to create a speech recognition model.