Though it's not quite ready to usher in the Doolittle future we've all been waiting for, modern AI translation methods are proving more than sufficient in accurately transforming humanity's roughly 6,500 spoken and written communication systems between one another. The problem is that each of these models tends to only do one or two tasks really well -- translate and convert text to speech, speech to text or between either of the two sets -- so you end up having to smash a bunch of models on top of each other to create the generalized performance seen in the likes of Google Translate or Facebook's myriad language services. That's a computationally intensive process, so Meta developed a single model that can do it all. SeamlessM4T is "a foundational multilingual and multitask model that seamlessly translates and transcribes across speech and text," Meta's blog from Tuesday reads. It can translate between any of nearly 100 languages for speech-to-text and text-to-text functions, speech-to-speech and text-to-speech supports those same languages as inputs and outputs them in any of 36 others tongues, including English.