Roblox has introduced an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) model designed to translate text chats instantly, making it virtually unnoticeable to users that messages from other players are being translated, serving a daily active user base exceeding 70 million, Roblox’s development team is taking a significant step forward to enhance its vast community by offering real-time AI chat translation, bridging players worldwide.
The AI chat translator currently supports 16 languages, including English, French, Japanese, Thai, Polish, and Vietnamese, and is capable of recognizing colloquialisms and platform-specific abbreviations, Dan Sturman, Roblox’s Chief Technology Officer, emphasized the company’s goal to make platform users feel at ease by enabling them to understand each other’s messages seamlessly.
Automatically translating chats, the translator allows users to view the original message with a simple click on an icon, sturman highlighted that user engagement increases when players can communicate in their native language, driving the initiative to remove language barriers through automatic translation.
Roblox embarked on creating a large language model (LLM) trained on publicly available internal data, this LLM was integrated into an environment managing multiple translation applications, each specializing in a single language, enabling efficient resource utilization without the need for separate LLMs for each language.
Building a platform-specific LLM was deemed more straightforward than modifying an existing LLM, considering the project’s scope, Roblox monitors chats for trust and safety reasons and gathers feedback to refine translations.
The addition of AI-powered chat translation does not alter the platform’s privacy and security protocols, prohibited words remain banned, and the platform works with generative AI models to enhance user experience, including an AI assistant for developers introduced last year.
The translator also automatically translates image assets into the user’s default language, such as words on buildings, looking beyond text chat translation, Roblox plans to leverage AI for translating non-compliant words into compliant alternatives and potentially introduce AI-based translation for voice chats, enabling real-time voice translation.
Other companies are also developing AI translation models, with Meta releasing the SeamlessM4T translator for speech-to-text conversion in nearly 100 languages and Google’s Universal Speech Model, used within YouTube for translating captions in approximately 100 languages.
