Roblox implements an automatic translation system using artificial intelligence in its chat. It is a proprietary technology that allows translation into 16 languages, almost instantly and regardless of the source and destination languages. The objective of this new technology is to facilitate communication between the platform's users, who already number 70 million people daily.
About 5,000 messages are sent per second in the Roblox chat. It is an absurd volume if you want to do a manual simultaneous translation, you would need an army of translators. For this reason, the company responsible for the game has implemented a new automatic translation system in its text chat.
The basis of this artificial intelligence is a Large Language Model (LLM), something very similar to the technology behind ChatGPT. In this case, the model has been trained to be able to translate between the 16 languages available in Roblox: English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Polish and Vietnamese.
This technology allows you to translate automatically and simultaneously between these 16 languages, regardless of the target and source languages. That means that two players – a Russian and a Korean, for example – could be having a real-time chat conversation and each would receive the other's messages in their own language.
To do this, the Roblox team has developed its own Grand Language Model, which works with any of the 16 languages. They have done this because it is much more efficient to have a single model than to train a specific model for each language pair. This second option would require a total of 256 different models (16x16) and would be very inefficient.
Additionally, for the translation system to understand the game's own slang in any of the 16 languages, Roblox has used a manual technology review system with specialized workers. On the other hand, it will also implement an option for users to rate the translations so that the LLM continues to improve.
Beyond the translation capabilities, the speed is also surprising: 100 milliseconds. This makes translation completely automatic and simultaneous in practice. The player does not notice any type of wait between sending and receiving the message. At Roblox they talk about “optimizing the model so that it has low latency.”
At Roblox they are committed to the use of artificial intelligence in automatic translation. They have been using it for years to translate static texts into the experiences their users create, but they still want to go further. The company's chief technology officer, Daniel Sturman, says they are working on an automatic voice chat translation system.
A little bit would be like Doraemon's translator jelly. The idea is that players speak in their native language through voice chat and that Roblox translates everything simultaneously and sends this translation to other users. For someone who speaks Turkish to communicate in their own language with someone who speaks Japanese, but using their voice, as in a call.
According to Daniel Sturman, “this may sound like science fiction now and it will take us some time to achieve it, but we will continue working on the translation. In the not too distant future, Roblox will be a place where people from all over the world can communicate effortlessly and without barriers and not only through chat, but in all possible ways.
