When Microsoft and Google try their best for whose artificial intelligence chat robot is better, we can easily find that this is not the only purpose of machine learning and language model. In addition to the rumored plan to showcase more than 20 products driven by artificial intelligence in this year’s annual Google I/O event, Google is moving towards the goal of establishing an artificial intelligence language model that supports 1000 different languages.
In the update released on Monday, Google shared more information about the Universal Speech Model (USM), which Google called a "critical first step" to achieve its goal.
YouTube has used USM to generate closed captions, and it also supports Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), which can automatically detect and translate languages, including English, Mandarin Chinese, Amharic, Cebu, Assam and so on.
Now, Google USM supports more than 100 languages, and will be used as a "foundation" to build a wider system. At the same time, Meta is developing a similar artificial intelligence translation tool, but it is still in its early stage.
You can read more about USM and how it works in research papers published by Google:
One goal of this technology may be to detect and provide real-time translation in augmented reality glasses, just like the concept demonstrated by Google in I/O activities last year. However, this technology seems to be a little far away, and Google’s wrong expression of Arabic during the I/O conference proves how easy it is to make mistakes.