San Francisco, March 7 – Google has shared more information about the Universal Speech Model (USM), a system that the company describes as a “critical first step” in realising its goals, which is now moving closer toward its goal of building an AI language model that supports 1,000 different languages to beat ChatGPT.
In November last year, the company announced its plans to create a language model supporting 1,000 of the world’s most-spoken languages while also revealing its USM model.
The tech giant describes USM as a family of state-of-the-art speech models with 2 billion parameters trained on 12 million hours of speech and 28 billion sentences of text, spanning 300+ languages.
“USM, which is for use in YouTube (e.g., for closed captions), can perform automatic speech recognition (ASR) not only on widely spoken languages like English and Mandarin, but also on under-resourced languages like Amharic, Cebuano, Assamese, and Azerbaijani to name a few,” Google said in a blogpost.
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Google currently claims that USM supports over 100 languages and will serve as the “foundation” for a much larger system.
Meanwhile, Google is expected to introduce a host of AI features for its products in the near future, and among them, Gboard for Android is working to integrate the Imagen text-to-image generator.
Google making Android more safe in 2023
Google has highlighted its key initiatives for 2023 which is to make Android and Google Play more safe and secure.
“It’s our top priority to keep Android and Google Play safe for developers to build successful businesses and provide quality apps and games to billions of users around the world,” the tech giant said in an Android Developers blogpost on Monday.
“We’ll continue to work in collaboration with developers, publishers, regulators and more as we navigate the transition to a more private mobile ecosystem.”
This year, the company will continue to improve Google Play’s Data safety section with new features and policies that will aim to give users more clarity and control around “deletion practices.”
Developers can also enhance their users’ safety by reducing the permissions they request for accessing users’ data.
Also, developers can start testing privacy, security and transparency enhancements in the Android 14 Developer Preview 1.
“Developers have told us that they want more help protecting their business, users, and IP. So, we’ve continued enhancing Play Integrity application programming interface (API) and automated integrity protection to help you better detect and prevent risks, and strengthen your anti-abuse strategy,” the tech giant said.
