SPEECH & AUDIO
NLP
Scaling Speech Technology to 1,000+ Languages
May 22, 2023
Abstract
Expanding the language coverage of speech technology has the potential to improve access to information for many more people. However, current speech technology is restricted to about one hundred languages which is a small fraction of the over 7,000 languages spoken around the world. The Massively Multilingual Speech (MMS) project increases the number of supported languages by 10-40x, depending on the task. The main ingredients are a new dataset based on readings of publicly available religious texts and effectively leveraging self-supervised learning. We built pre-trained wav2vec 2.0 models covering 1,406 languages, a single multilingual automatic speech recognition model for 1,107 languages, speech synthesis models for the same number of languages, as well as a language identification model for 4,017 languages. Experiments show that our multilingual speech recognition model more than halves the word error rate of Whisper on 54 languages of the FLEURS benchmark while being trained on a small fraction of the labeled data.
AUTHORS
Written by
Sayani Kundu
Alexei Baevski
Alexis Conneau
Ali Elkahky
Andros Tjandra
Apoorv Vyas
Arun Babu
Bowen Shi
Paden Tomasello
Vineel Pratap
Publisher
NeurIPS
Related Publications
May 12, 2026
HUMAN & MACHINE INTELLIGENCE
RESEARCH
NeuralSet: A High-Performing Python Package for Neuro-AI
Corentin Bel, Linnea Evanson, Julien Gadonneix, Andrea Santos Revilla, Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Julie Bonnaire, Charlotte Caucheteux, Alexandre Défossez, Théo Desbordes, Pablo Diego-Simón, Shubh Khanna, Juliette Millet, Pierre Orhan, Saarang Panchavati, Antoine Ratouchniak, Alexis Thual, Hubert Jacob Banville, Jarod Levy, Jean Remi King, Josephine Raugel, Jérémy Rapin, Katelyn Begany, Marlene Careil, Simon Dahan, Sophia Houhamdi, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Teon Brooks, Yohann Benchetrit
May 12, 2026
May 04, 2026
NLP
Compute Optimal Tokenization
Sachin Mehta, Alisa Liu, Margaret Li, Artidoro Pagnoni, Gargi Ghosh, Luke Zettlemoyer, Mike Lewis, Srini Iyer, Tomasz Limisiewicz
May 04, 2026
March 24, 2026
NLP
OPEN SOURCE
HyperAgents
Jenny Zhang, Bingchen Zhao, Jakob Foerster, Sam Devlin, Tatiana Shavrina, Winnie Yang
March 24, 2026
March 17, 2026
RESEARCH
NLP
Omnilingual MT: Machine Translation for 1,600 Languages
Omnilingual MT Team, Niyati Bafna, Ioannis Tsiamas, Mark Duppenthaler, Albert Ventayol-Boada, Alexandre Mourachko, Andrea Caciolai, Arina Turkatenko, Artyom Kozhevnikov, Belen Alastruey, Charles-Eric Saint-James, Chierh CHENG, Christophe Ropers, Cynthia Gao, David Dale, Edan Toledo, Eduardo Sánchez, Gabriel Mejia Gonzalez, Holger Schwenk, Jean Maillard, Joe Chuang, João Maria Janeiro, Kevin Heffernan, Marta R. Costa-jussa, Mary Williamson, Nate Ekberg, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Pere Lluís Huguet Cabot, Rashel Moritz, Shireen Yates, Surya Parimi
March 17, 2026
Help Us Pioneer The Future of AI
We share our open source frameworks, tools, libraries, and models for everything from research exploration to large-scale production deployment.
Our approach
Latest news
Foundational models
Meta © 2026