What you need to know

• Meta’s new Language Technology Partner Program needs volunteers to submit transcribed speech, translations, and written text.

• Contributors get to work with Meta’s AI experts and receive training on open-source language tools.

• The Canadian territory, home to endangered Inuit languages, is already on board.

Meta and UNESCO are joining forces to advance open-source AI by collecting speech and text data as part of a new program to understand and translate underrepresented languages, making AI more inclusive globally.

Meta’s new Language Technology Partner Program is on the hunt for contributors to help build its AI. The company says it is looking for people to pitch in with at least 10 hours of transcribed speech recordings, pre-translated sentences, and a solid chunk of written content in their native language.

This data will be the backbone of Meta’s AI development, helping it better understand and translate languages that often get left behind.

Meta is offering a chance for partners to team up directly with their AI experts, helping weave new languages into open-source speech and translation models. As a bonus, contributors will get hands-on training through workshops, learning the ropes of Meta’s open-source language tools.

Nunavut, a Canadian region home to at-risk Inuit languages, has already signed on to join the initiative. You have until March 7, 2025, to apply for the Language Technology Partner Program.

Alongside the new program, Meta is rolling out an open-source machine translation benchmark to test how well language translation models perform. Created by linguists, it currently works with seven languages and is available on the Hugging Face platform, where anyone can pitch in and contribute.

Meta’s new language program rides on the success of earlier projects., including "No Language Left Behind (NLLB), which cracked the code on translating a ton of languages. Then came "Massively Multilingual Speech" (MMS), which blew minds by transcribing over 1,100 languages.

It's clear that Meta AI keeps expanding its language capabilities, while also rolling out cool features like auto-translation for content creators. Last September, the company even teased a voice translation tool for Instagram Reels, letting creators dub and lip-sync their videos automatically.

Big players in translation tech are also stepping up for endangered languages. Google, for instance, brought Inuktut (an Inuit language) on board in October 2024.

For its part, Meta pitches these initiatives as acts of goodwill, but let’s be real—the company is also cashing in on the breakthroughs in speech and translation AI.