Learn how Roblox’s new AI chat translator is breaking down language barriers
Roblox, a highly engaging platform with over 70 million daily active users, has introduced a new real-time chat translator powered by artificial intelligence (AI). This innovative feature enables users to easily converse with others from around the globe by translating chats in 16 languages using Roblox’s own AI technology. This advancement allows Roblox users to communicate in their preferred language, enhancing their overall experience on the platform. Learn more about this exciting development.
Roblox AI powered chat translator
Roblox announced in a blog post that this new AI chat translator is powered by the company’s proprietary Large Language Model (LLM). Daniel Sturman, Roblox’s CTO emphasized that it was easier for the company to build its own LLM rather than modify an off-the-shelf one, given the scale of the project.
This feature allows a Korean user to write a chat message in Korean, and an English speaking user can see it in English and vice versa. Translations happen in real time with a latency of 100 milliseconds. Supported languages include Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Polish, Vietnamese and English.
Announcing the feature, Sturman said, “Now with our new real-time AI translations, we’ve made something possible in Roblox that isn’t even possible in the physical world—helping people cross language barriers and communicate seamlessly in immersive 3D experiences. In the future, we envision that every part of the Roblox experience will be fully translated into their to their native language, including providing AI-based speech translation.
How does it work?
The AI-powered real-time chat translator uses a unified transformer-based translation LLM that can handle multiple language pairs in a single model. LLM is equipped with a source sentence and a target language. After this, the relevant “expert” can be activated to create the translations. This enables a better use of resources without compromising the quality of real-time translations.
Roblox says the LLM using this feature was pre-trained on available open-source data, as well as experience translation data, human-annotated chat translation results, and common conversational phrases and sentences.
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