February 5, 2024 – Today, Roblox announced automatic chat translations which will give users worldwide the ability to easily communicate with each other, regardless of what language they speak. Built on Roblox’s proprietary artificial intelligence technology, the real-time chat translations power instantaneous translation of text chat messages among users in the 16 languages that Roblox currently supports.
Starting today, users across the globe are able to start chatting with other community members in their preferred language. For example, a user in Korea can type a chat message in Korean, and an English-speaking user will see it in English, while at the same time a German-speaking user will read and respond to the message in German.
“Our custom large language model is so fast we’re able to do real-time translations from any one of 16 languages to any of the others as people type to help them connect in real time, no matter where they’re from,” said Daniel Sturman, Chief Technology Officer at Roblox. “We started using AI to translate in-experience content at scale, so our community developers can engage more users globally. Now, thanks to our new real-time AI chat translations, we’ve made something possible on Roblox that isn’t even possible in the physical world—enabling people to overcome language barriers and seamlessly communicate with one another in immersive 3D experiences. In the future, we envision every part of a user experience on Roblox to be fully translated into their native language, including offering AI-powered voice translation.”
As of the quarter ending September 30, 2023, over 70M users are connecting and communicating every day, with 19.7 million new friendships formed on Roblox daily. Users across 180 countries exchanged 2.4 billion chat messages daily and 904 billion in twelve months.** Typically, about one in three in-experience chat messages need to be translated, meaning approximately one third of the time, users within the same server on Roblox are chatting with people who do not speak the same language as them.
“As we continue to grow our user base globally, we seek to make Roblox not only easily accessible, but also truly localized, offering everything from local payment options to culturally relevant content and avatars, and, of course, in-experience content and chat translation,” said Zhen Fang, Head of International at Roblox. “Our early experiments with this new automated chat translation technology showed a very positive impact on time spent, chat engagement, and session quality, so we are very excited to roll it out to further enhance and expand our community’s daily communication. The world feels a little bit smaller when we enable features like these at global scale.”
Automatic chat translation will become instantly available today within all experiences that leverage TextChatService, Roblox’s chat engine for experiences. For more information, please read our blog here.
*Based on accepted friend requests.
**Represents the twelve months ending September 30, 2023.
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