Beginner’s Guide to SeamlessM4T

The first, all-in-one, multimodal translation model by Meta AI

Photo by Guillaume de Germain on Unsplash

The topic for today is about SeamlessM4T, a new massively multilingual and multimodal machine translation model developed by Meta AI.

Based on the official repository, SeamlessM4T is built to

… provide high quality translation, allowing people from different linguistic communities to communicate effortlessly through speech and text.

At the time of this writing, the initial release of SeamlessM4T supports:

• 101 languages for speech input.
• 96 Languages for text input/output.
• 35 languages for speech output.

One main advantage of SeamlessM4T framework is that it is a single unified model that is capable of the following tasks:

• Speech-to-speech translation (S2ST)
• Speech-to-text translation (S2TT)
• Text-to-speech translation (T2ST)
• Text-to-text translation (T2TT)
• Automatic speech recognition (ASR)

SeamlessM4T is designed to solve the following problems related to all existing translation systems:

• limited language coverage, which result in challenges for multilingual communication