- The developers of Roblox have announced that real-time chat translations are coming to the game.
- The chat translation is powered by a large language model (LLM) that Roblox’s team developed.
- 16 languages will be supported at launch allowing more players from different countries to better interact with one another.
Last year’s trend of everything being imbued with some sort of AI capability shows no signs of dying down, but the most recent announcement from Roblox is rather interesting. This as the wildly popular game has announced that real-time chat translations are set to arrive soon thanks to AI.
More specifically, the developers at Roblox have built their own large language model in order to power the experience for players.
“Thanks to our new real-time AI chat translations, we’ve made possible on Roblox something that isn’t even possible in the physical world — enabling people who speak different languages to communicate seamlessly with one another in our immersive 3D experiences. This is possible because of our custom multilingual model, which now enables direct translation between any combination of the 16 languages we currently support,” it noted in a blog post.
The supported languages are as follows:
- English
- Chinese (Simplified)
- Chinese (Traditional)
- French
- German
- Indonesian
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Portuguese
- Russian
- Spanish
- Thai
- Turkish
- Polish
- Vietnamese
The developers explain that this new feature will be enabled for any element of Roblox that supports in-experience text chat.
“The chat window will automatically show Korean translated into English, or Turkish translated into German, and vice versa, so that each person sees the conversation in their own tongue. These translations are displayed in real time, with latency of approximately 100 milliseconds, so the translation happening behind the scenes is nearly invisible,” they pointed out.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect to all of this is the fact that Roblox built its own LLM to power this experience, which is quite the feat given that the game garners an average of 70 million active users daily.
“To train this unified model, we began by pretraining on available open source data, as well as our own in-experience translation data, human-labeled chat translation results, and common chat sentences and phrases. We also built our own translation evaluation metric and model to measure translation quality. Most off-the-shelf translation quality metrics compare the AI translation result to some ground truth or reference translation and focus primarily on the understandability of the translation,” the developers added.
Those working at Roblox have not detailed when this new feature will be accessible to players, but it is expected to crop up soon.
