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

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. What Meta actually built 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. Meta’s Fundamental AI Research team, known as FAIR, set out to close a large slice of that gap and released Omnilingual ASR as open source on November 10, 2025. The system supports over 1,600 languages. More than 500 of those had never been supported by any ASR solution before. On accuracy, Meta reports a character error rate below 10% for 78% of the supported languages. Character error rate measures how many individual letters the system gets wrong. A score under 10...