Meta launched Omnilingual ASR, an open-source automatic speech recognition system covering more than 1,600 languages, including approximately 500 that had never been supported by any ASR tool before. The company released a family of models ranging from 300 million to 7 billion parameters, along with the Omnilingual ASR Corpus covering 350 underserved languages. TIME selected this invention among its Best Inventions of 2026 on October 15, nearly a year after the public release on November 10, 2025. Meta reports a character error rate below 10% for 78% of supported languages. The system is available under the Apache 2.0 license and has already been deployed in Nigeria by health practitioners to improve patient care.
Source: Read the original article
