Roblox adds real-time AI chat translation using its own language model

Currently serving over 70 million daily active users, Roblox is still going strong since its September 2006 launch -- almost 18 years ago. The development team is now taking one step further to boost the platform's massive community, by way of providing real-time AI chat translation to connect gamers around the world. According to CTO Daniel Sturman, his team needed to build their own "unified, transformer-based translation LLM (large language model)" in order to seamlessly handle all 16 languages supported on Roblox, as well as to recognize Roblox-specific slangs and abbreviations (this writer just learned that "obby" refers to an obstacle course in the game). As a result, the chat window always displays the conversation in the user's own tongue -- with a small latency of around 100 milliseconds, so it's pretty much real time. You can also click on the translation icon on the left of each line to see it in its original language.