During an Inside the Lab: Building for the metaverse with AI livestream event on Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn't just expound on his company's unblinking vision for the future, dubbed the Metaverse. He also revealed that Meta's research division is working on a universal speech translation system that could streamline users' interactions with AI within the company's digital universe. "The big goal here is to build a universal model that can incorporate knowledge across all modalities... all the information that is captured through rich sensors," Zuckerberg said. "This will enable a vast scale of predictions, decisions, and generation as well as whole new architectures training methods and algorithms that can learn from a vast and diverse range of different inputs." Zuckerberg noted that Facebook has continually striven to develop technologies that enable more people worldwide to access the internet and is confident that those efforts will translate to the Metaverse as well.

Microsoft Translator, recently made available in live preview, can translate face-to-face conversations in real time. The Translator is available through a mobile app or browser, and can translate conversations with up to 100 speakers, into 60 different languages. The announcement was made via a blog post from Microsoft on Tuesday. The tool can perform speech translation in nine languages, and it can translate text in more than 50. And yes, it can even work in Klingon.