Roblox launches real-time AI chat translation tool, will support 16 languages

Roblox has created an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can translate supported languages ​​in chats in near real-time. The company claims a latency of around 100 milliseconds. The online gaming platform, which has more than 70 million daily active users, built a Local Large Language Model (LLM) to build the tool that can translate any combination of 16 languages. The basic model behind attribution puts a lot of emphasis on accuracy, fluency, as well as the context of the rest of the sentence to find the best translation.

Announcing a new feature in a Post“Using AI to automate real-time translation in text chat breaks down language barriers and brings more people together, no matter where they live in the world,” said Daniel Sturman, Roblox’s Chief Technology Officer. ” The tool currently supports English, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Polish and Vietnamese.

This feature is automatically enabled in chat boxes. When multiple users type in different languages, AI will automatically translate them into the user’s default language in real time. A translation icon is placed in front of the sentence, which, when clicked, switches the language back to the original.

During the process of creating the AI ​​tool, the online gaming platform faced a peculiar challenge and found that translating one language to another was easy, but working across a combination of 16 languages ​​was difficult. So, instead of making 256 different models (16 x 16), the company took a new approach. Sturman explained that a unified, transformer-based architecture was used for LLM where all translations are controlled by the source sentence and the target language. “It’s like having multiple translation apps, each specializing in the same language group, all available with the same interface,” he added.

This system allows for some unique features. Apart from focusing more on accuracy, fluency and context, the AI ​​tool can also translate sentences where a combination of different languages ​​are used. Further, human evaluators were used to teach the model modern slang and trending phrases in each of the 16 languages. This process will be repeated continuously to keep the LLM updated.

Additionally, the company used a ‘back-translation’ technique for less common translation pairs such as French to Thai. Here, Roblox first translated the content and then translated it back to the original language. The source material was then compared to the back-translated version for errors. Then, the labeled data will be used to increase the amount of translation data for the learning of the model.

Not stopping there, Stormin revealed that Roblox is now looking into automatic voice chat translation for its users.

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