Speech recognition is an important cog in Big Tech's AI machinery. But, despite its ubiquity, speech recognition is still a work in progress. Today, Facebook is heralding a major breakthrough in the way it trains these systems to learn new languages. The company says it has developed a method of building speech recognition tools that don't require transcribed data. The time consuming task involves humans listening to and transcribing hours of audio, a monotonous process that has to be repeated for each language. Whereas Facebook's "unsupervised" system learns purely from speech audio and unpaired text to give it a better sense of what human communication sounds like.