Google AI Updates Universal Speech Model to Scale Automatic Speech Recognition Beyond 100 Languages

Google AI have recently unveiled a new update for their Universal Speech Model (USM), to support the 1,000 Languages Initiative. The new model performs better than OpenAI Whisper for all segments of automation speech recognition. A universal speech model is a machine learning model trained to recognize and understand spoken language across different languages and accents. USM is a family of state-of-the-art speech models with 2B parameters trained on 12 million hours of speech and 28 billion sentences of text, spanning 300 languages. According to Google, USM can conduct automatic speech recognition (ASR) on under-resourced languages like Amharic, Cebuano, Assamese, and Azerbaijani to frequently spoken languages like English and Mandarin.