Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta AI announces Massive Multilingual Speech code, models for 1000+ languages

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 232 posts

Re: Meta AI announces Massive Multilingual Speech code, models for 1000+ languages

#201

Post by sangnoir »

westurner wrote: post #158
generalizations wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This paragraph justifies the decision, IMHO. > Collecting audio data for thousands of languages was our first challenge because the largest existing speech datasets cover 100 languages at most. To overcome this, we turned to religious texts, such as the Bible, that have been translated in many different languages and whose translations have been widely studied for text-based language translation research. I think the…

While AFAIU the UN: UDHR United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the most-translated document in the world, relative to the given training texts there likely hasn't been as much subjective translation analysis of UDHR. Awesome-legal-nlp links to benchmarks like LexGLUE and FairLex but not yet LegalBench; in re: AI alignment and ethics / regional law https://github.com/maastrichtlawtech/awesome-legal-n…

The UN's UDHR likely yields <5mins of audio data in any language which is kinda useless as far as training data goes.

Re: Meta AI announces Massive Multilingual Speech code, models for 1000+ languages

#202

Post by sangnoir »

omneity wrote: post #131

I was super excited at this, but digging through the release [0] one can see the following [1]. While using Bible translations is indeed better than nothing, I don't think the stylistic choices in the Bible are representative of how people actually speak the language, in any of the languages I can speak (i.e. that I am able to evaluate personally). Religious recordings tend to be liturgical, so even the pronunciation…

> I don't think the stylistic choices in the Bible are representative of how people actually speak the language, in any of the languages I can speak

The cadence and intonation sounded a little weird, but I suspect fine-tuning can improve that by a lot. I am really excited to see some low-resource language finally get some mainstream TTS support at all.

Re: Meta AI announces Massive Multilingual Speech code, models for 1000+ languages

#203

Post by christmm »

emporas wrote: post #102
lukeschlather wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Translate is still inferior to ChatGPT 3.5. I suspect this style of model is significantly more expensive to run and Google doesn't want to give it away for free. Really, the only problem with ChatGPT is that it refuses to translate things that go against its nanny programming, which can make it almost worse than useless in some real-life situations.

I tried ChatGPT 3.5 against Google Translate, translating English to Greek, my native language, and they perform almost the same. The text was difficult text of science fiction, fantasy stuff and the results were tolerable. Roughly 50% of the text had to be manually rewritten. Maybe for more casual sentences and not so difficult text, they perform better, i haven't tried. Anyways, they are both better than nothing.

[dead]

Re: Meta AI announces Massive Multilingual Speech code, models for 1000+ languages

#204

Post by westurner »

sangnoir wrote: post #201
westurner wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While AFAIU the UN: UDHR United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the most-translated document in the world, relative to the given training texts there likely hasn't been as much subjective translation analysis of UDHR. Awesome-legal-nlp links to benchmarks like LexGLUE and FairLex but not yet LegalBench; in re: AI alignment and ethics / regional law https://github.com/maastrichtlawtech/awesome-legal-n…

The UN's UDHR likely yields <5mins of audio data in any language which is kinda useless as far as training data goes.

Compared to e.g. religious text translation, I don't know how much subjective analysis there is for UDHR translations. It's pretty cut and dry: e.g. "Equal Protection of Equal Rights" is pretty clear.

"About the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Translation Project" https://www.ohchr.org/en/human-rights/universal-declaration/... :

> At present, there are 555 different translations available in HTML and/or PDF format.

E.g. Buddhist scriptures are also multiply translated; probably with more coverage in East Asian languages.

Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the US Declaration of Independence, had read into Transcendental Buddhism and FWIU is thus significantly responsible for the religious (and nonreligious) freedom We appreciate in the United States today.

Re: Meta AI announces Massive Multilingual Speech code, models for 1000+ languages

#205

Post by PufPufPuf »

eigenvalue wrote: post #105

I just wanted to test out the TTS locally on a powerful Ubuntu 22.04 machine, but the process for setting it up seems pretty broken and poorly documented. After 20 minutes of trying I finally gave up since I couldn't get the VITS dependency to build (despite having a fully updated machine with all required compilers). It seems like they never really bother to see if the stuff works on a fresh machine starting from sc…

Research projects are notorious for this. The people behind them aren't very experienced in distributing software (many never heard of docker), the usual language of choice is Python which has poor packaging, native dependencies complicate things, and everything is on the bleeding edge by definition.

Usually, it needs a brave soul to reverse engineer what exact versions of dependencies are needed and make a Colab or Dockerfile that puts it all together.

Re: Meta AI announces Massive Multilingual Speech code, models for 1000+ languages

#207

Post by 6510 »

reaperman wrote: post #84
EMIRELADERO wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd go a step further and say that the models themselves probably aren't copyrightable.

I mean I personally feel like almost all software is math and anything that isn’t frontend isn’t legally copyrightable or patentable. But the courts disagree with my interpretation. And if it were up to me all copyright and patents would have exponentially increasing fees on an annual basis to maintain, but thatd require a change is statutes. I think the jury is still out on your interpretation though, and I suspect…

effort and cost should be accounted for, reasonable licensing fees should go in the patent. Loss of lives and loss of quality of life should be considered. The only goal on the other end of the equation should be to encourage people sufficiently to not keep their invention secret.

We should also have a fund for particularly tricky inventions and copyrights that would greatly benefit mankind.

Say, someone or some institution writes a good school book. We can just buy the book for whatever we think is reasonable. If they want to publish the same book the next year with the chapters shuffled around they could be entitled to a tiny fraction of the previous sum or it could be denied for being spam. If this bankrupts the company is of very little interest.

Re: Meta AI announces Massive Multilingual Speech code, models for 1000+ languages

#208

Post by bryanrasmussen »

matsemann wrote: post #64
mach1ne wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, full-on babelfish is simply not possible. The meaning of the beginning of a sentence can be modified retroactively by the end of the sentence. This means that the Babelfish must either be greatly delayed or awkwardly correct itself every once in a while.

Ah, reminds me of learning German, where you can chuck all the verbs onto the end. There was this sentence we had as a fun toy example, where it was like half a paragraphs of verbs in the end, and you had to try and match them up with the beginning of the sentence. Edit:found a reference to it https://www.reddit.com/r/German/comments/ul0xgt/just_for_fun...

Joke that I heard was supposed to come from the 1880s.

Some travelers stop off at an inn in the Swiss Alps, and they notice that are the various tables at the inn are other nationalities. They amuse themselves by listening in on the conversations (and displaying their stereotypes) - the Italians are all talking at the same time very loud and never stop moving their hands, the French are all arrogant artistes, the Danes are boring and only talk about the weather, and then they notice the Germans.

There was obviously a very important conversation going on with the Germans because one German would say something and every other German would stop and listen intently until they were done, and then another one would start up and every one would stop and listen intently until that one was done, but in following the conversation it became clear it was not because the conversation was important, but because the Germans were waiting to hear the verb to understand what was being said.

Re: Meta AI announces Massive Multilingual Speech code, models for 1000+ languages

#209

Post by machinawhite »

zztop44 wrote: post #142
machinawhite wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well then you're wasting time managing your containers? Have you ever used k8s, it's a full time job lol

I don’t think anyone is suggesting k8s for running an ai model as a side project on a single machine.

> a side project on a single machine

Sorry I don't see how will containers help here

Re: Meta AI announces Massive Multilingual Speech code, models for 1000+ languages

#210

Post by numpad0 »

l33t233372 wrote: post #170
armatav wrote: post #54

Imagine if we used these types of models for like 500 years and it locked their vocabulary in time, disallowing any further language blending; then somehow the servers turned off and nobody could communicate across language barriers anymore. Someone should write that down in some sort of short-story involving a really tall structure.

Imagine if we used them everyday for 500 years but tune all the languages to be ever so slightly similar each day until there is one language.

With ~1000 dialects.
Post reply on HN