IFiFire·Dec 1, 2023
LICENSE
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
https://github.com/facebookresearch/seamless_communication/b...
In The Seamless Communication modelsfacebookresearch
seamless_communication
Jupyter Notebook2023–2023
facebookresearch / seamless_communication
seamless_communication
Foundational Models for State-of-the-Art Speech and Text Translation
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9Mentions
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11.9KGitHub stars
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Foundational Models for State-of-the-Art Speech and Text Translation
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
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HN mentions by week9 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2023-08-22 16:19:11 UTC to 2023-12-01 18:17:31 UTC. Weeks start Monday, UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 21 | 2023-08-21 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-08-28 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| Aug 28 | 2023-08-28 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-09-04 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 4 | 2023-09-04 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-09-11 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 11 | 2023-09-11 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-09-18 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 18 | 2023-09-18 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-09-25 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 25 | 2023-09-25 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-10-02 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2 | 2023-10-02 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-10-09 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 9 | 2023-10-09 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-10-16 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 16 | 2023-10-16 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-10-23 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 23 | 2023-10-23 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-10-30 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 30 | 2023-10-30 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-11-06 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 6 | 2023-11-06 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-11-13 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 13 | 2023-11-13 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-11-20 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 20 | 2023-11-20 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-11-27 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 27 | 2023-11-27 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-12-04 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
What Hacker News says
9 sourcesThe license details are listed on the project GitHub
https://github.com/facebookresearch/seamless_communication#l...
In The Seamless Communication modelsI'm reposting from here[0][1][2] because there was no discussion
The original title is "Introducing a suite of AI language translation models that preserve expression and improve streaming". I've shortened it here so that it's more obvious that these models are from Meta (and worth discussing). The code is on GitHub:
https://github.com/facebookresearch/seamless_communication
From the GitHub: SeamlessM4T is our foundational all-in-one Massively Multilingual and Multimodal Machine Translation model delivering high-quality translation for speech and text in nearly 100 languages. SeamlessM4T models support the tasks of:
- Speech-to-speech translation (S2ST)
- Speech-to-text translation (S2TT)
- Text-to-speech translation (T2ST)
- Text-to-text translation (T2TT)
- Automatic speech recognition (ASR)
A wild guess: Meta goin
Read the rest
g to be working on embedding this into hardware as fast as possible so that you can chat to anyone on the planet, no matter which language they speak
Related papers:
- Zero-shot Expressive Speech-to-Speech Translation: https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/sonar-expressive-z...
- Efficient Monotonic Multihead Attention: https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/efficient-monotoni...
- Multilingual Expressive and Streaming Speech Translation
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38477728
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38479724
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37232489
I wish that Meta would release models like SeamlessM4T[0] under the same license as llama2, or an even better one. I don't understand the rationale for keeping it under a completely non-commercial license, but I agree that is better than not releasing anything at all.
There seem to be opportunities for people to use technology like SeamlessM4T to improve lives, if it were licensed correctly, and I don't see how any commercial offering from smaller companies would compete with anything that Meta does. Last I checked, Meta has never offered any kind of translation or transcription API that third parties can use.
Whisper is licensed more permissively and does a great job with speech to text in some languages, and it can translate to English only. However, it can't translate between a large number of languages, and it doesn't have any kind of
Read the rest
text to speech or speech to speech capabilities. SeamlessM4T seems like it would be an all-around upgrade.
[0]: https://github.com/facebookresearch/seamless_communication
Seamless Communication – new translation (text, speech) model from Facebook
2 points · Open discussion281M and 235M param models too.
https://github.com/facebookresearch/seamless_communication/b...
I don't really know how the metrics they list compare to whisper, I'm very curious if these are fast enough for realtime speech2text? I think whisper technically could but it was difficult to do or something like that?
In SeamlessM4T, a Multimodal AI Model for Speech and Text TranslationThey have a smaller model[1] that might be amenable to Whisper-ization.
Much smaller language matrix though.
[1]: https://github.com/facebookresearch/seamless_communication/b...
In SeamlessM4T, a Multimodal AI Model for Speech and Text Translationcode: https://github.com/facebookresearch/seamless_communication
paper: https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/seamless-m4t/
demo: https://seamless.metademolab.com/
In SeamlessM4T, a Multimodal AI Model for Speech and Text Translationcode: https://github.com/facebookresearch/seamless_communication
paper: https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/seamless-m4t/
demo: https://seamless.metademolab.com/
In SeamlessM4T: All-in-one multimodal translation model