It's been a while since Roblox came out, but it's still a hit across all ages until now. People from all over the world participate in the online game platform, and the company aims to break down language barriers between players by adding real-time translation in chat.
Roblox's Real-Time AI Translator
Roblox has several game titles that players can join in, and a lot of them require communication with other players. Since 70 million daily active users come from all around the world, it's quite possible that all parties do not speak the same language.
The team has developed something that could make it easier for players to understand each other. The new feature is capable of translating words from 16 languages, which can be prompted by the translation icon to the right of the user's gamer tag.
It was also developed to make the translation fast enough, getting the latency down to approximately 100 milliseconds. To make this possible, Roblox built a unique model for each language pair to accommodate the 15 million active experiences.
The model works for all possible permutations, meaning that with all 16 languages, the unified transformer-based translation LLM has 256 different models (16 languages x 16 languages), making it seem like the platform has multiple translation apps in a single interface.
Roblox is even accounting for in-game slang when it comes to translations. For instance, players tend to call obstacles "obby," which can be detected by the large language model and translated into other languages, thanks to a context-aware model.
This also allows the real-time translation to translate a chat even if it has a mix of languages. According to Chief Technology Officer Daniel Sturman, the system is still able to detect and translate into the target language.
The company used available open-source data, as well as our own in-experience translation data, human-labeled chat translation results, and common chat sentences and phrases to train the AI model that's responsible for the new feature.
Samsung Also Has This Feature
This is not the first instance where a company intended to break down language barriers between people. Samsung also announced a feature back in November 2023. With its new Galaxy AI, Samsung smartphones will be able to translate phone calls in real-time.
Samsung says that "Galaxy AI is a comprehensive mobile AI experience, powered by both on-device AI developed at Samsung and cloud-based AI enabled by our open collaborations with like-minded industry leaders."
With the integrated feature, users will no longer need to use third-party apps for translations. It also serves as a great security feature since a built-in function means that your private conversations will never leave your phone, and cannot be used by third-party developers.
"Mobile technology has an incredible power to enable connection, productivity, creativity, and more for people around the world, but until now, we haven't seen mobile AI ignite that in truly meaningful ways," said Mobile eXperience Business EVP Wonjoon Choi.
