Looks very cool. One thing I have been looking for, which this doesn't seem to cover (at least I didn't see any mention of IPA in the model documentation), is a way to transcribe unknown languages phonetically, using the International Phonetic Alphabet to spell them (sound-based spelling rather than meaning-based spelling). I know several linguists doing research on minority languages (fewer than 10,000 speakers in s…
We take a lot of shortcuts when speaking, it's actually much harder to transcribe phonemes than to transcribe words, even when aware of the language being spoken. Some models have been trained for the task (e.g. look at https://huggingface.co/spaces/KoelLabs/IPA-Transcription-EN ), but the error rate is really high.
Example: Schwabisch is wild and would be phonetically transcribed very differently from Hochdeutsch which is its ostensible language progenitor (technically more a cousin than an ancestor in the lineage of language evolution), but if the goal is merely to focus the model purely on phonetic transcription then you can add additional post-processing layers which map sounds to core concepts shared across dialects for actual translation. But I like your idea of interacting with the intermediate elements to familiarize yourself at least with the phonetic patterns, we humans are still thinkers enough to infer patterns of grammar and semantics from these building blocks just as we have done for the entire history of the species/lineage before written representations of language came along (relatively late -- evidence of script cropped up only once civilization had centralized to a sufficient degree to make economics non-local and non-trivial).
tl;dr the big words: it's not til you collect enough spoken samples of the dead(ish/dying) language being spoken that the local idiosyncracies are discovered, luckily linguists are smart enough to probably anticipate and certainly post-process language snippets to grasp the common structures for this or that given language.