The popular gaming platform Roblox has launched an AI-driven real-time chat translation system. This new feature now allows Roblox's 70 million daily active users to seamlessly communicate in 16 different languages.

Roblox has designed a customized transformer model specifically trained for its platform's unique language. The system can translate conversations between all 16 supported languages in 100 milliseconds.

Daniel Sturman, Chief Technology Officer of Roblox, stated that the design of this model is not only to ensure translation accuracy but also to achieve the "speed and scale" required to process over 5,000 parallel chat records per second.

One key advantage of the customized model is its fluency in using the platform's unique terminology. The system understands common abbreviations like "obby" and "afk," as well as constantly updated slang dictionaries in each language.

A single unified model replaces 256 separate models, improving training efficiency. The similarity between languages also enhances quality, which cannot be achieved by independent models.

Roblox aims to achieve seamless communication across experiences, devices, and modes. The company plans to continue updating the model and collecting user feedback to address inaccuracies. While the current system is limited to text chat, it hopes to one day achieve automatic voice chat translation. The chat translation system marks an important step towards this goal.