Facebook Launches AI That Understands Language Without Labels

“Machine learning models need to be trained with large amounts of transcribed speech audio. This process is effective but expensive.” Decades ago, asking for basic directions or information would have been an arduous task. The advent of solutions such as Google Translate alleviated that problem to an extent. But, is this enough? For example, India alone is home to 23 official languages and thousands of unofficial ones and Google Translate supports just 11 of India's languages. Other speech recognition technologies might allow even fewer languages. Also, languages such as Basque and Swahili are far likelier to have more limited AI speech recognition capabilities than Hindi, English and Mandarin. Hence, the paths opened up by speech recognition technology are only available to a small fraction of the countless languages spoken all over the world. This is because most AI for speech recognition belongs to a category called supervised learning. Machine learning systems in such tec