Mark Zuckerberg is the CEO of Meta Platforms – a company that has recently failed to achieve its desired customer growth. Now is the time to change, says Zuckerberg. One of the innovations is an AI translator, which should bring unexpected possibilities in the future Facebook metaverse.
Facebook turns into Metaverse
First you need to understand the plans of Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook. The largest company in the conglomerate is the social network Facebook.
In 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus, a company that makes VR glasses, for $2 billion. These glasses offer the user an immersive experience in a virtual world. Facebook and especially Mark Zuckerberg saw promising opportunities in this technology.
For a long time, though, it was pretty quiet around Oculus. The diffusion of VR glasses has not progressed as much as expected. This raised the question of how Facebook would continue to deal with the acquired company.
In 2021, the time had finally come and the subject was taken up again. Back then, Decentraland and The Sandbox gave the Metaverse a boost. Both promising video games market themselves as Metaverse – a kind of digital parallel universe that offers many more possibilities than previous video games and is much more immersive.
Blockchain and virtual reality
An idea that apparently also inspired Facebook and sparked fundamental change.
This is how Facebook wants to conquer the Metaverse
The Metaverse is said to have a much larger social component than other video games. A special immersion should be possible thanks to VR technology. Facebook noticed that it was predestined for the Metaverse as a social network with a VR subsidiary and joined the trend.
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The parent company was soon renamed Meta Platforms. Eventually, Facebook will reform and become a metaverse. But the plans go further. In a new press release, Meta describes special features that the Metaverse should also have.
Meta AI develops its own translator
The purpose of the metaverse is to connect people in a special way. But the world is full of different languages. There is often a lack of mutual understanding of languages, so clear communication is only possible with a small selection of the entire world population.
In the metaverse of Meta Platforms, there should no longer be a place for this weak point. Meta is currently developing the Universal Speech Translator so that a wide variety of people can speak to it.
The implementation in the metaverse allows people to communicate with each other without speaking the other person’s language. Each person simply uses a language of their choice – mainly their own mother tongue.
The interlocutor then receives what is said in his own mother tongue. The translator works in real time and is supposed to be able to process all languages in the world.
This will be especially important when people start teleporting through virtual worlds and having experiences with people from other countries. Now is our chance to improve the internet and set a new normal where we can all communicate with each other, no matter what language we speak or where we come from. And if we get it right, this is just one example of how AI can help bring people together on a global scale.
Says Mark Zuckerberg. Of course, the translator also needs a base. The work for this has already started.
Meta Develops No Language Left Behind Translator AI
For the translator to have the expected effect, an artificial intelligence that has learned all the languages of the world beforehand must act in the background. This AI is called “No Language Left Behind”.
No Language Left Out should also be used outside of the Metaverse. On the one hand, the translation of languages should work better than before, on the other hand, the translation of smaller languages should be significantly expanded.
According to Meta, billions of people still live without programs in their own mother tongue. This creates an information imbalance – according to Meta.
So No Language Left Behind not only wants to simplify personal contact with each other, but also to make large parts of the Internet accessible to new target groups who have so far remained hidden behind a language barrier.