Reacción a "Meta designs artificial intelligence model capable of instant speech-to-speech translation"

This is a very interesting study, although not so recent. Meta already published a first version of the study in August 2023. Despite this, this study incorporates several notable innovations.

Firstly, it is a unified system that manages all aspects of translation (speech and text) in a single environment, instead of relying on several independent systems.

Another relevant aspect is the large number of languages it supports: more than 100 input languages and dozens of output languages. It also stands out for its robustness in the face of real-world challenges, such as handling noise and understanding different accents, aspects that often cause difficulties for other systems.

In terms of performance, it outperforms the best previous systems on a number of metrics, with an improvement of more than 20%.

Finally, it is commendable that the study includes an analysis of whether translations increase the toxicity of texts or how they address possible gender bias. However, it is unfortunate that Meta, the employer of the researchers in this study, seems to have recently decided to abandon efforts in this regard with its new content moderation policy.