Meta announced a new AI model called Voicebox yesterday, one it says is the most versatile yet for speech generation, but it’s not releasing it yet: The model is still only a research project, but Meta says can generate speech in six languages from samples as short as two seconds and could be used for “natural, authentic” translation in the future, among other things.
One thing I am hoping for with “AI” tech is to have better language teaching software. It would be crazy to have an AI teacher correct you mid conversation or be able to adapt to what you are struggling with.
Not really AI but if you want to learn lojban you get most of the way: The language actually has a formal grammar so it’s possible to write bog-standard software that doesn’t care when you say “You must have patience, my young Padawan” instead of “Patience you must have, my young Padawan”. It’s going to tell you which it expected but not beat you over the head with it.
That’s a really cool idea!
This is actually something I was working on at my last job: Using speech recognition to capture oral reading errors and give feedback to children. It’s not a large field but definitely one of the more noble AI applications. One of the major downsides is that because of privacy concerns you will want to run models locally instead of simply accessing 3rd party (OpenAI/Meta) models through an API, which introduces performance limits.