Currently serving over 70 million daily active users, Roblox is still going strong since its launch in September 2006, almost 18 years ago. The development team is now going further to strengthen the platform's massive community, providing real-time AI chat translation to connect players around the world. According to According to CTO Daniel Sturman, his team needed to create its own “unified, transformer-based translation LLM (large language model)” in order to seamlessly manage the 16 languages supported on Robloxas well as recognizing Roblox-specific slangs and abbreviations (this writer just learned that “obby” refers to an in-game obstacle course).
As a result, the chat window always displays the conversation in the user's language – with a small latency of around 100 milliseconds, so it's almost real-time. You can also click the translation icon to the left of each line to see it in its original language. Sturman claims that thanks to the language model's efficient architecture and iterative training, it “outperforms commercial translation APIs on Roblox content.” The development team will later deploy a feedback tool to help improve the quality of the translation, in addition to its continuous updates with new taglines it picks up on the platform.
by Roblox the translation efforts do not stop there. Sturman adds that his team is already exploring the possibility of automatically translating “text over images, textures, 3D models” and more. As Roblox supports voice chat, the executive also discusses the possibility of automatic voice chat translations, so players around the world can seamlessly speak to each other in their own language on the platform. Since Samsung already offers a similar feature through Galaxy AIIt probably won't be long before we hear another update from Roblox to this end.