Roblox introduces AI chat translator to break language barriers; Know how it works

With over 70 million daily active users, Roblox is certainly one of the most engaging platforms in the world. To make conversing with other users around the world easier, Roblox has announced the launch of a new artificial intelligence-powered (AI) real-time chat translator. It can translate chats in real-time in 16 languages using the company’s proprietary AI technology, allowing Roblox users to communicate with each other in their preferred language. Know all about it.

Roblox AI-powered chat translator

In a blog post, Roblox announced that this new AI chat translator runs on the company’s proprietary Large Language Model (LLM). Daniel Sturman, Roblox’s Chief Technology Officer highlighted that the company found it easier to build their own LLM instead of having to modify an off-the-shelf one, considering the scale of the project.

With this feature, a user in Korea can type a chat message in Korean, and an English-speaking user will see it in English, and vice versa. The translations are happening in real time with a latency of 100 milliseconds. The supported languages include Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Polish, Vietnamese and English.

Announcing this feature, Sturman said, “Now, thanks to our new real-time AI chat translations, we’ve made something possible on Roblox that isn’t even possible in the physical world—enabling people to overcome language barriers and seamlessly communicate with one another in immersive 3D experiences. In the future, we envision every part of a user experience on Roblox to be fully translated into their native language, including offering AI-powered voice translation.”

How does it work?

The AI-powered real-time chat translator uses a unified, transformer-based translation LLM that can handle various language pairs in a single model. The LLM is provided with a source sentence and target language. Then, the relevant “expert” can be activated to generate the translations. This allows for better utilization of resources without sacrificing the quality of real-time translations.

Roblox says the LLM powering this feature was pre-trained on available open-source information, as well as experience translation data, human-labelled chat translation results, and common chat sentences and phrases.

Also, read these top stories today:

Deepfakes On The Rise! A finance worker in Hong Kong transferred more than $25 million to scammers after they posed as his colleagues on a video call, marking perhaps the biggest known corporate fraud using deepfake technology to date. Know how to spot deepfakes here.

Meta Urged to Rethink Its Policy! Facebook owner Meta's policies on manipulated media have been criticized as 'incoherent' and insufficient by an oversight board. Dive in here.

Tech Layoffs Continue!  The tech industry has started 2024 with another wave of job cuts, paring back even further after widespread layoffs last year. So far, some 32,000 tech workers have lost their jobs in 2024. Find out more here.

One more thing! We are now on WhatsApp Channels! Follow us there so you never miss any updates from the world of technology. ‎To follow the HT Tech channel on WhatsApp, click here to join now!