Multiplayer games can help you connect with people and build friendships with other players around the world. People you would never have met otherwise. However, language barriers are often an obstacle to making these connections. Roblox’s new AI chat translator seeks to fix that.
On Monday, Roblox released a real-time AI chat translation tool in Roblox. Enough to allow its 70 million daily active users to communicate transparently in 16 different languages, including French, English, Chinese, Spanish, and even Korean.
“With our new real-time AI chat translations, we’ve made something possible on Roblox that isn’t even possible in the physical world: allowing people speaking different languages to communicate with each other seamlessly in our immersive 3D experience,” said Daniel Sturman, Chief Technology Officer of Roblox.
Translations are done in real time
Users can enjoy the translation feature in any Roblox experience (game) that has enabled Roblox’s text chat service. The chat window will automatically translate any text into the person’s native language without the user having to take any additional action.
Translations are done in real time, with a latency of around 100 milliseconds, according to Roblox. This allows users to conduct a conversation with the same flow rate as usual, as can be seen in the video embedded in this link. Furthermore, the user is not obliged to deprive himself of the original text. If they still want to see the original message, all they have to do is click the button next to the translated message.
To power the translator, Roblox has built its own Large Language Model (LLM), based on transformers, which can tackle the difficult task of translating a combination of 16 languages into each other in a single model. According to Roblox, this is a resource-saving alternative to creating individual models that translate each pair, which would have amounted to a total of 256 different models.
Roblox said it was committed to improving the accuracy of its model and would implement a tool for players to give feedback on translations, report translation errors, or even suggest a better translation.
The model is available today. The full list of languages includes English, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, l Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Polish and Vietnamese.