Roblox Unveils Real-Time AI Text Translation to Enhance Global Gaming Interaction

Roblox has launched a groundbreaking real-time text translation feature, set to revolutionize the gaming experience for its users.

This sophisticated AI tool seamlessly translates text from players in 16 languages, including English, French, Japanese, and Vietnamese, making communication effortless across its vast gaming community.

With 70 million daily users, Roblox aims to improve player interactions and overall engagement. "We know engagement goes up when users speak or interact with others in their own language," says CTO Dan Sturman. "We took that concept and removed the language barrier with automatic translation."

Imagine the convenience of conversing instantly with someone in a foreign country—this feature brings that fantasy to life in the gaming world.

Game-Changing Technology

The journey began with Roblox developing a transformer-based large language model (LLM), trained on both public and internal data. This LLM was integrated into a mixture of expert (MoE) architecture, enabling it to run multiple translation applications without the need for a separate model for each language.

The official blog post details, "We need a context-aware model that recognizes Roblox-specific language, including slang and abbreviations (think obby, afk, or lol). Beyond all of that, our model needs to support any combination of the 16 languages Roblox currently supports."

Sturman emphasizes that Roblox will continue to monitor user communications for safety and to address any translation inaccuracies. This initiative not only aims to enhance user experience but also to maintain a safe and friendly environment.

While Roblox’s translation feature is innovative, it's part of a broader trend. Meta, the owner of Facebook, has introduced SeamlessM4T, a speech-to-text and text-to-text translator, and YouTube utilizes Google's Universal Speech Model to provide captions in over 100 languages.