Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has announced plans to use the Bible and other religious texts to process over 4,000 languages with the ultimate goal of preserving those languages.
As part of an effort to collect data for its Massively Multilingual Speech (MMS) project, the Meta Artificial Intelligence research team turned to the Bible and other religious texts to tackle the daunting prospect of gathering data for thousands of languages, since existing speech datasets currently top out at no more than 100 languages.
By turning to the Bible, which has been translated throughout the world and shared in audio recordings of those translations, researchers were able to create a dataset of New Testament readings in more than 1,100 languages that spanned an average of 32 hours of data in each language.
In order to cover the 27 books and 260 chapters in the New Testament, Meta used data from Bible.com, GoTo.Bible and FaithComesByHearing.com.
Ultimately, the project is meant to preserve languages that could potentially go extinct in the coming years.
This is not the first time AI has been used to amplify the timeless message of the Bible.
In June 2020, the makers of the Christian meditation app Soultime released what was then the world’s first-ever audio version of the Bible read in its entirety by an artificial intelligence voice.