Meta has launched a new initiative in partnership with UNESCO to enhance AI-powered speech recognition and translation.
The programme, called the Language Technology Partner Program, aims to gather speech recordings, transcriptions, written texts, and translated sentences in multiple languages.
Meta is working with partners who can provide at least 10 hours of speech data and large text collections.
The government of Nunavut, a Canadian territory where Inuktut is spoken, is among the early contributors.
The goal is to include more languages in AI models that will be made publicly available.
As part of the initiative, Meta is also releasing an open-source machine translation benchmark with linguist-crafted sentences in seven languages.
Developers can access and contribute to this benchmark on the AI platform Hugging Face.
While Meta presents this as a philanthropic effort, the company stands to gain from improved AI speech and translation tools.
Meta has faced criticism over handling non-English content on its platforms. Reports suggest that misinformation in languages like Italian and Spanish remains unflagged at higher rates than in English.
The company says it is working on improving its translation and moderation systems.
