Meta’s Omnilingual ASR named one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2026

The open-source speech recognition system covers more than 1,600 languages, including roughly 500 that no ASR tool had supported before Meta ’s Omnilingual Automatic Speech Recognition system has landed on TIME’s list of the Best Inventions of 2026. The recognition came on October 15, 2026, almost a year after Meta’s research team first released the tool to the public. The pitch is simple: speech-to-text for more than 1,600 languages. That includes approximately 500 low-resource languages that, until this project, no automatic speech recognition system had touched. Automatic speech recognition, or ASR, is the technology that listens to spoken words and turns them into written text. It powers dictation on your phone, captions on videos, and the transcripts that pile up after every work call. The world has roughly 7,000 languages.

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