Real-time AI Chat Translation Comes to Roblox

Artificial intelligence has been tapped to help Robox users understand each other better, the online game playing and building platform said on Monday.

“Imagine discovering that your new Roblox friend, a person you’ve been chatting and joking with… is actually in Korea and has been typing in Korean the entire time, while you’ve been typing in English, without either of you noticing,” the company pitched.

The AI integration will allow users to communicate across more than 16 languages in real-time using the standard Roblox chat window. Languages that the AI can translate include Chinese, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, English, Russian, and Spanish.

These translations, Roblox said, have a latency time of 100 milliseconds.

“Thanks to our new real-time AI chat translations, we’ve made possible on Roblox something that isn’t even possible in the physical world: enabling people who speak different languages to communicate seamlessly with one another in our immersive 3D experiences,” the announcement crowed.

The addition of the AI translator, Roblox added, has led to stronger engagement and session quality.

“Using AI to automate real-time translations in text chat removes language barriers and brings more people together, no matter where they live in the world,” Roblox said.

While the platform can translate over a dozen languages, Roblox acknowledges that there may be a problem with translating less common pairs like French to Thai due to a lack of high-quality data provided to the training model.

“To address this gap, we applied back translation, where content is translated back into the original language, then compared to the source text for accuracy,” Roblox said.

Roblox did not immediately reply to Decrypt’s request for comment.

Other game developers, including Blizzard Entertainment, Square Enix, and Ubisoft, have joined Roblox in investing heavily in artificial intelligence.

Last summer, on a quarterly earnings call, Roblox co-founder and CEO David Baszucki said the company is using generative AI to create more dynamic games.

“We’re entering an exciting new period on our platform,” Baszucki said. “Ultimately, we’ll enter an age on Roblox where anyone can make their avatar or clothing 100% through text prompts. So if I, or you, wanted to build a piece of clothing, we could describe it. We’re going to see that created in real-time.”

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.