Breaking down language barriers: Roblox’s AI-powered real-time translation system
Every day, millions of players from around the world gather on Roblox to play and create games. A truly global community with over 70 million daily active users. However, language barriers have always been a challenge for players trying to connect with other players who speak different languages. However, Roblox recently took a game-changing step to break down these barriers by introducing an AI-powered real-time translation system to the Metaverse.
Roblox AI Technology
In a blog post, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Daniel Sturman explained how the platform developed an in-house Large Language Model (LLM) specifically for this purpose. This “unified translation model” boasts an impressive native latency of 100 milliseconds, allowing you to translate text messages almost instantly.
Additionally, the system can translate 16 languages, including English, Chinese, French, and German. This advancement builds on Roblox’s existing use of AI to translate static content within games and takes it one step further by extending it to real-time chat.
Challenges and Solutions
The development of this AI-assisted translation system was challenging. Sturman highlighted two major obstacles facing the team. The first challenge was to create a system that could translate between the 16 supported language pairs rather than simply one-to-one translation. The second challenge involved the speed of translation, which had to be fast enough to facilitate real-time conversation.
To solve these problems, the Roblox team developed a situational awareness model that can recognize specific terms, slang, and abbreviations used within the platform. This means that players speaking different languages can interact without language constraints. Roblox also used back-translation techniques for less common language pairs using limited high-quality data.
With this method, the system translates the content back into the source language and compares accuracy. This data is then combined with supervised data to enhance the model’s learning process.
The introduction of this AI-powered real-time translation system aims to create a more inclusive and connected gaming community on Roblox. This allows players from all over the world to communicate and play together without language barriers.
Overcoming language barriers is important to connect everyone in the metaverse. This means making translation the main focus. Metaverse must handle a wide range of communication requirements, from everyday conversations to formal negotiations involving businesses and governments.
Sturman concluded by saying: voice Chat translation. Imagine if French speakers on Roblox could voice chat with people who only speak Russian. Both people were able to speak and understand each other with short latency in their own language, including the tone of voice, rhythm, and even emotion. It may sound like science fiction today and it may take some time to achieve, but we will continue to push for translation.
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