When you think of tools infused with artificial intelligence (AI) these days, it’s natural for ChatGPT and Bing Chat to spring to mind. But Facebook owner Meta wants to change that with SeamlessM4T, an AI-powered “universal language translator” that could instantly convert any language in the world into whatever output you want.
Meta describes SeamlessM4T as “the first all-in-one multilingual multimodal AI translation and transcription model.” That’s quite a mouthful, but in simple terms, it means it can convert languages in a range of different ways, such as taking speech audio and switching it into text in a different tongue.
According to Meta, the tool’s speech recognition and translation features can work in a few different ways:
• Speech recognition for nearly 100 languages
• Speech-to-text translation for nearly 100 input and output languages
• Speech-to-speech translation for nearly 100 input languages and 36 output languages (including English)
• Text-to-text translation for nearly 100 languages
• Text-to-speech translation for nearly 100 input languages and 35 output languages (including English)
Meta says this will “allow people to communicate effortlessly through speech and text across different languages.”
SeamlessM4T is being released under a research license, and Meta states it’s doing this to “allow researchers and developers to build on this work.” As well as that, the metadata of the dataset that was used to train the translation model, called SeamlessAlign, is also being publicly released. This consists of “270,000 hours of mined speech and text alignments,” Meta claims.
However, Meta did not make it clear where these 270,000 hours of “mined speech” have been sourced. Concerns have been raised over the privacy implications of Meta’s work on AI chatbots, while other AI tools have already been caught stealing protected work. There will no doubt be fears that Meta could have done something similar when it trained SeamlessM4T.
There are already other translation tools like Google Translate that can convert text to text and speech to text, but Meta says its own efforts are superior. SeamlessM4T, Meta argues, “reduces errors and delays, increasing the efficiency and quality of the translation process.”
Meta has not said whether the new tool will be integrated into its apps like Facebook and Instagram, but the company did reveal that it aimed to “explore how this foundational model can enable new communication capabilities” in the future. We’ll have to see what that entails.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Google DeepMind's AI world model Genie 4 can now build interactive worlds that you can explore and reshape as they run. It also generates ambient sounds, music, and dialogue that respond to your actions.
The new world model builds on Genie 3 with improved realism, more natural human movement, and better simulations of real-world physics. It could eventually help with everything from game development to training robots.
Apple has an incredible talent for making me admire its products while simultaneously questioning what on earth it's thinking with the pricing. This isn't even something as bizarre as a monitor stand, but the audacity for starting a new laptop lineup from $2,000 doesn't surprise me.
The newly announced 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 is just the latest to showcase this. The funny thing is, I already know that it's going to be a reliable workstation. You get a powerful new 2nm M6 processor, a gorgeous Liquid Retina XDR display, and up to 24 hours of battery life. We were impressed by the M5 MacBook Air, so the high-end M6 powered MacBook Pro definitely won't let us down.