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

Roblox has introduced an AI-powered real-time chat translator that can translate chats in 16 languages, enabling users to communicate seamlessly in their preferred language.

Roblox is one of the most popular gaming platforms online, and now it has a new AI chat translator. (Roblox)

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.

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