Meta has launched the Omnilingual ASR, an open-source automatic speech recognition system capable of understanding over 1,600 languages, including 500 low-resource languages previously unsupported. "This is a major step towards truly universal AI," said Alexandr Wang, Meta's AI chief. The system employs a seven billion parameter wav2vec 2.0 model trained on diverse datasets, aiming to enhance accessibility in digital speech technology and bridge the gap for underrepresented linguistic communities.