Communication Without Borders: Roblox Launches AI Real-time Translation Chat

Roblox CTO Dan Sturman recently announced that the game has launched an AI real-time translation feature to facilitate more convenient communication among players worldwide. In an interview with U.S. media outlet The Verge, Sturman stated that this new feature boasts extremely fast processing speeds, making players almost unaware that the original message was sent in a different language. Currently, the AI translation function supports sixteen languages, including English, French, Japanese, Thai, Polish, and Vietnamese, among others. Additionally, players can easily click 'Original Language,' just like on social media, to view the sender's original text.

Sturman emphasized that in games, when players use the same language, the frequency of their communication increases rapidly. Introducing AI real-time translation software is seen as a highly beneficial step to overcome language barriers among players worldwide and increase overall communication frequency.

The Transformer-based technology adopted by Roblox is one of the most advanced today, used to build large language models (LLMs). This Transformer model utilizes a set of mathematical techniques known as 'attention' or 'self-attention,' capable of sensitively capturing subtle interactions and dependencies between data elements, including even ambiguous ones.

Furthermore, Roblox has integrated a Mixture of Experts (MOE) model. Through a gating model, it subdivides a single task space into multiple subtasks, which are then processed by multiple expert networks (sub-models), each handling specific subtasks, ultimately yielding the overall prediction.

The advantage of this machine learning architecture is that Roblox does not need to build a separate LLM for each language, thereby significantly saving the time costs required for AI development.