Image: Facebook
Facebook’s plan to speak every language

Good morning! This Tuesday, Facebook's working on a better way to translate the internet, there's an AR social network for your ears, and how about a home office on a cruise ship.
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Anna Kramer writes: Machine-learning translations are notoriously difficult, and training the models without English even more so. Yesterday, Angela Fan, an AI researcher at Facebook, and her team announced the first such model that can translate 100 languages into 100 languages and back again without relying on English.
That it doesn't rely on English is a big deal. English-language training data is pretty robust compared to basically every other language in the world, so a lot of translation algorithms go from, say, Mandarin, to English, to French, instead of directly from Mandarin to French. Which, as you can imagine, can lead to both bad and English-centric translations.
Translation is hard, though, and good research doesn't always make good products. Non-English speaking Facebook users are out of luck if they were hoping this would help them straight away. The new model won't be put into use on Facebook until the researchers can determine whether it actually improves translation in practice. Just because the model beats other English-centric multilingual models on what's known as a BLEU score (a way of scoring translation), it doesn't necessarily have a practical use without more tinkering.
But this is all still good news for researchers, Fan told me. "I'm really passionate about enabling research for others," she told me, "and plenty of really smart people … would really rely on having this data and model available."
More from Anna: About 7.1 million American households still don't have access to a single checking or savings account, including almost 14% of Black households and 12% of Hispanic ones (compared with less than 3% of white households), according to 2019 FDIC numbers released yesterday.
The problem is cash has definitely not been king over the last six months. As restaurants and local businesses and minimarts were lauded for going cashless to protect against the spread of the coronavirus, unbanked families were cut out.
Peer-to-peer payment technologies, like those provided by Paypal, Venmo and CashApp, were also included in the report for the first time. While the survey found that about a third of Americans rely on these apps, there was also a pretty scary statistic about the reality of that access for unbanked households:
Dennis Crowley told me he currently has the best job in the New York tech scene: running an R&D lab at Foursquare tasked with building "cool and novel products with our technology." The lab's latest: Marsbot for AirPods, a location-based service for finding cool stuff around you, that functions entirely through your headphones.
This could be a fun voice in your head, or a total nightmare of notifications, depending on how it works. Crowley told me he likes the idea of going big and then pulling back later: "Let people drink from the firehose and then fix it, rather than drip, drip, drip," he said. Though Marsbot for AirPods does already have tools for reporting problematic content.
The app was supposed to launch at SXSW, where I suspect it would have been a big hit. Now that there's less going out, he's not sure how the new app will do. He's not particularly concerned, though: To Crowley and Foursquare, it's more project than product. "I'm sick of not launching this, so I wanted to launch it and get out there," he said.
Strengthening healthcare interoperability and cybersecurity in the COVID era
A stronger healthcare system means connecting people, data and technology for a frictionless experience across care settings. At Philips, we're developing interoperable solutions that seamlessly transfer data so clinicians can stay focused on what matters most: the patient.
AOC: Great at Twitter, and now ready to take on game-streaming:
Pakistan un-banned TikTok, but it's still keeping an eye on the platform:
John Stankey said tech giants have too much negotiating power, which is only a tiny bit ironic coming from the CEO of AT&T:
Instacart hired two new executives: Christina Hall is its new (and first) CHRO and Ariel Bardin is its new SVP of product. Hall joins from LinkedIn, Bardin from YouTube.
GetYourGuide laid off about 90 people, as the SoftBank-backed travel company continues to struggle during the pandemic.
So you don't have to go to the office anymore, but you don't want to stay home all day. How about … working and living on a converted Carnival Cruise ship, with all your influencer and crypto-libertarian friends? All it'll cost you is $25,000, and presumably every ounce of sanity you had left. Not exciting enough? How about crushing it all day from the comfy seat of a Ferris wheel in Japan? That one's only $18. Such a steal.
Strengthening healthcare interoperability and cybersecurity in the COVID era
A stronger healthcare system means connecting people, data and technology for a frictionless experience across care settings. At Philips, we're developing interoperable solutions that seamlessly transfer data so clinicians can stay focused on what matters most: the patient.
Today's Source Code was written by David Pierce, with help from Shakeel Hashim. Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to david@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day, see you tomorrow.
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