SEA-LION x Typhoon: Cross-Lingual Audio Modeling for Southeast Asia 🌏🎧 How can a model trained only on Thai and English help with Indonesian or Tamil? . Typhoon latest collaboration with AI Singapore dives into this question. We developed SEA-LION-TH-Audio, a multimodal LLM fine-tuned on under 1,000 hours of Thai-English audio. . Key takeaways from the research: ✅ Outperformed or matched bigger multilingual models in Thai ASR—even without broader SEA data. ✅ Showed strong zero-shot transfer: Thai ↔ Indonesian and Thai → Tamil translations, despite no direct training data in those languages. ✅ Smaller, more focused training proved effective for low-resource scenarios. . This is not the biggest model—but it’s a proof of concept for smarter, data-efficient AI in Southeast Asia. . We see real potential in: 🔎 Expanding to more SEA languages (Malay, Vietnamese, etc.) 🗣️ Adding speech-to-speech capabilities 🤝 Regional collaboration for shared open resources . Why does it matter? Southeast Asia’s linguistic diversity deserves inclusive AI. By studying cross-lingual transfer, we’re paving the way for accessible, efficient models for all our languages. . 👉 Read more: #AudioAI #NLP #CrossLingual #SoutheastAsia #Typhoon #AISingapore #Research #SEALION