Many people are not familiar with Roblox, but that’s because they don’t have children or nieces/nephews nearby. This gaming platform is one of the great successes of the last decade, on par with sagas like Minecraft or Fortnite.
Roblox has created an AI model that, according to them, translates text chats so quickly that, at first, users don’t even realize that it is translating messages from other players.
It works with 16 languages: including English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Thai, Polish, and Vietnamese.
The goal is for everyone to be able to communicate
Dan Sturman, CTO of Roblox, stated in an interview with The Verge that the goal is for Roblox users to feel more comfortable interacting with each other by allowing them to understand what they are saying. The translator automatically translates the chats, but users can click on an icon to see the original message.
“We know that engagement increases when users speak or interact with others in their own language,” explains Sturman. “We took that concept and removed the language barrier with automatic translation.”
Roblox started building a large language model (LLM) based on transformers, which was trained with public and internal data. They placed the LLM within a mixture of experts (MoE) architecture, an environment that ran multiple translation applications, each expert in a different language.
This allowed Roblox to save resources without the need to create a separate LLM for each language. Sturman claims that, given the scale of the project, his team believed it was easier to build their own model than to modify a standard LLM.
Sturman explained that Roblox monitors chats (for trust and safety reasons) and can receive feedback if the translations are not exactly perfect. He added that the implementation of chat translation AI “does not change anything in our privacy and security process, and prohibited words will continue to be blocked.”
Roblox, which in recent years has been trying to attract an older audience, has been working with generative AI models to improve the user experience. Last year, it introduced a chatbot assistant for developers. It also automatically translates image assets, such as words on buildings, to the user’s default language.
