There are still many people out there who do not speak “standard” languages that have their own writing system. One example is those who speak the many Chinese dialects such as Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew and so on.
Mark Zuckerberg, whom we all know as the founder of Meta has unveiled their spanking new AI translator that can translate Hokkien to English and vice versa accurately.
On the night of 19 October, Mark Zuckerberg uploaded a 1-minute video on his Facebook page. In it he says,
“Our team developed the first speech-to-speech AI translation system that works for languages that are only spoken and not written like Hokkien.”
He then introduced Peng Jen Chen, a Meta AI researcher who speaks Taiwanese Hokkien. Peng Jen and Mark then spoke in their own respective language as part of the live demo. Hearing the translation is really surprising!
The Meta founder also said that Hokkien is a language that is spoken by many people around the world but since there is no standard writing system, it was pretty challenging to build a translation system.
Peng Jen replied and said that Hokkien was not taught when he was in school and it was passed down orally from one generation to another.
“Thanks to your research, now all of us can understand it too”, said Mark Zuckerberg to Peng Jen.
In the caption of the video, the Meta founder said that they will be open-sourcing this translator so that “people can use it for more languages”.
If you would like to know the more technical side of things, you can click here and here.
Well, this is certainly a good idea, now we can bust out this translator when we go to Penang!
Also read: WATCH: Malay Man Sings Tamil Song So Gorgeously, He Knocked Everyone’s Socks Off!
