In a game-changing move, Roblox has introduced a cutting-edge AI text translation feature that seamlessly translates users’ chat into 16 languages in real-time.
This innovation, available across all Roblox experiences, marks a significant leap forward, boasting an impressive low latency of approximately 100 milliseconds. Roblox Corp emphasizes that achieving such real-time translation is “something that isn’t even possible in the physical world.”
This breakthrough caters to the diverse global community of Roblox,
with support for languages like Chinese, English, Russian, and Spanish. The platform, used by 70 million daily users, faced the challenge of enabling effective communication on a massive scale. The Language Model (LLM) developed by Roblox needed to be not only accurate and fast but also “context-aware” of the platform’s unique slang and abbreviations.
Roblox opted for a unified, transformer-based translation LLM, providing a single model to handle all language pairs efficiently. This approach, akin to having specialized apps for language groups, ensures optimal translation matching for the given context.
The model’s capability to leverage linguistic similarities between languages is a fascinating aspect, enhancing accuracy. It can even operate in scenarios where the source language is not correctly set, translating mixed-language sentences with reasonable clarity.
Ensuring safety and adherence to policies, Roblox incorporates trust and safety systems to filter out inappropriate content. The blog post delves deeper into the model’s training process, utilizing both open-source data and Roblox chat histories, with ongoing improvements expected as more languages are added.
This achievement is just the starting point for Roblox’s ambitious plans. The next frontier involves automatically translating various dimensions, such as text on images, textures, and 3D models. The ultimate goal? Automatic voice chat translations. Roblox envisions a future where users can communicate seamlessly across languages, even capturing the nuances of tone, rhythm, and emotion in voice chats.
While this endeavor may take time, Roblox is steadfast in its commitment to creating a platform where global users can connect effortlessly through text and voice. It’s a visionary leap into the future of communication, proving that Roblox is not just for kids but for everyone ready to experience the next level of virtual interaction.