Meta announced a new AI model called Voicebox yesterday, one it says is the most versatile yet for speech generation, but it’s not releasing it yet: The model is still only a research project, but Meta says can generate speech in six languages from samples as short as two seconds and could be used for “natural, authentic” translation in the future, among other things.
This is actually something I was working on at my last job: Using speech recognition to capture oral reading errors and give feedback to children. It’s not a large field but definitely one of the more noble AI applications. One of the major downsides is that because of privacy concerns you will want to run models locally instead of simply accessing 3rd party (OpenAI/Meta) models through an API, which introduces performance limits.