AI Translation To All the World
Our mission is to break down language barriers worldwide and to help take the message of the Restored Gospel to every nation, kindred, tongue, and people. Imagine a world in which people can communicate and share the gospel with anyone else who reads, speaks, or signs a language other than their own.
Through our BYU Pathsay AI project, we are collecting audio recordings of Church-related and other content from BYU Pathway students in Africa and in many other parts of the world, speaking in their native languages. From general conference videos, we are creating a database of sign-language video clips and the corresponding English text. Using this data, our BYU student researchers develop textual, audio, and visual AI algorithms and models that recognize, generate, and translate these languages, participating in meaningful experiential learning and producing top-tier publications as they do so. Student software developers are further incorporating the AI models into our ToAll application, which can automatically dub live-streamed events and videos. This software enables messages from the Church, from Church-related advocate organizations, and even from our own BYU Speeches to be disseminated in a rapidly increasing number of languages, especially those spoken by underserved populations that currently have no access to such content.
Helping to fund these projects supports student wages, scholarships, fellowships, and conference and project travel. Funds to support the BYU Pathway students participating in this work can be given directly to BYU Pathway Worldwide, mentioning the “AI Translation To All the World - BYU” fund in the comments. Funds to support student translators who are using this technology to translate BYU Speeches can be given directly to the “Humanities BYU Speeches Translation fund.”
Click here to donate to the “AI Translation To All the World” fund