Now that Blizzard is part of Microsoft, I wonder if they could make it possible to use AI in (one of) their games. In an area that is universal and independent of individual titles or even platforms: our game chats.
Example of how it works:
Group of three players
I write something in portugese: “Meus queridos amigos”
Your client gets the message but AI translation catches it before displaying
AI translates it into your client language which happens to be italian
Your chat window shows “ Miei cari amici”
The third one is from UK or US and reads: “ My dear friends”
Automatic translation can be disabled. Clicking on the flag icon displays the original.
Why this is good for every player:
This feature may seem not that interesting for native english speakers at first, since the chat tends to be mostly in english. But be noted that the language barrier affects everything that requires at least some organisation, from providing information to trading to team play. Not because of spelling errors, but because players just dont communicate at all if they feel not confident in their english skills.
Btw this post is assisted by DeepL Write and I am not portugese nor is english my native language. Cool!
Imagine doing some PvP / random bgs and your teammates are unable to tell you where the enemies are attacking or they have trouble translating area names. It is a massive handicap.
Learning another language is no easy task and English is no exception. It also depends a lot on a persons influences. Of course, the language barrier is more of a problem in regions that serve many nations. If you ask me, then I tell you that although I am somewhat comfortable with writing English, it does get tiring after a while.
Why this is good for Blizzards wallet:
In case that wasn’t clear: Players who are in an environment where its easier to make connections become more attached to the place where they made them. And active players can draw many others to the game.
Blizzard games are focused on multiplayer experiences. Each of their games benefits (greatly) from player communication and I expect all upcoming games will most likely have chat functionality as well. Battlenet chat already links each games individual chat together, so it would make a lot of sense to have some sort of translation tool.
Standard in the near future
I found out that the developers of Roblox have trained a translation AI, that does exactly what I have described in this post and more. It was introduced in February this year and they also plan to add automatic voice translation at some point in the future. Good luck with that!
If you want to get some impressions I recommend the developer blog posts here:
Kinda OT… but why’s it when someone links an item it shows up as the language their WoW’s set on instead of whatever the client’s language other players are set at…?
Probably because of the way the item is posted. I don’t know the formatting. If it’s taking the item ID to create the link but adds the typed out name from the client language. Probably something like that.
To Topic:
That could lead to some transaltion issues, as AI translation is not all too accurate, especially when it comes to us internet users, who tend to misspell, ignore punctuation, grammar, etc.
A system simliar to FF14 would be working better. Though it requires some clicks, as you have to open a chat menu and choose from a (prety long) list of premade short sentences/words which are then posted in each clients language.
Good point.
Unfortunately I cant lay this idea out in much more detail since I am not a developer, but my second link suggests that the translation AI can be aware of the gamer language and common errors:
We look at this from multiple aspects, including accuracy (whether there are any additions, omissions, or mistranslations), fluency (punctuation, spelling, and grammar), and incorrect references (discrepancies with the rest of the text). We classify these errors into severity levels: Is it a critical, major, or minor error? In order to assess quality, we built an ML model and trained it on human labeled error types and scores. We then fine-tuned a multilingual language model to predict word-level errors and types and calculate a score using our multidimensional criteria. This gives us a comprehensive understanding of the quality and types of errors occurring. In this way we can estimate translation quality and detect errors by using source text and machine translations, without requiring a ground truth translation. Using the results of this quality measure, we can further improve the quality of our translation model.
To help the model understand modern slang, we asked human evaluators to translate popular and trending terms for each language, and included those translations in our training data. We will continue to repeat this process regularly to keep the system up to date on the latest slang.
I think it’s still early days for this kind of thing.
The EU probably has the biggest mix of languages as there are so many countries but most of the time we manage.
English realms tend to be the catch all for everyone who doesn’t want to be on, or doesn’t have a language specific set of realms. Most are able to communicate in English but I have been in groups where we’ve had to piece together some basic instructions with all our minor knowledge of other languages.
As I mentioned at the end, Roblox is already doing it. It’s not science fiction anymore and I think the circumstances are pretty good right now.
I suggest this for Blizzard mainly because Microsoft has its foot in the door with ChatGPT, they have Microsoft Azure and Teams, and of course there is the financial backing. And also a bit because Blizzard’s games like Diablo 4 and WoW seem to take accessibility serious (Screenreader, TextToSpeach).
I don’t know how much attention translation tools are getting from native English speakers, but I get the impression that there is a lot going on in this area right now. After all, the audience a company can reach with them is quite large. And there may be a limited window of opportunity to benefit from having it first.
I don’t have time to go into detail, but it’s a virtual crime that online games do not have the system implemented by Phantasy Star Online back in 2000 for the Dreamcast. It had shortcuts for many frequent uses of chat that was autotranslated to any other language supported by the game. Imagine the current ping system but with actual chat bubble.
I think this is an excellent idea to connect players with foreign languages. I think now with Microsoft Blizzard might be able to use OpenAI’s services for translation purposes. It won’t be perfect, but better then having nothing all.
But there are a few must haves if this would come to the game:
There should be an option that players can enable/disable in the Accessibility options.
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You should be able to choose yourself which languages you want translated or not. And if OpenAI could be used then around 100 different languages are available for translation. Even uncommon languages like: Hindi, Urdu, Russian, Dutch, Greek, Zulu, Hebrew, Scottish Gaelic etc…
And I would like to be able to enable/disable all of these in the options. Yes, that will be a long list, but it fits the equity and inclusive design of Blizzard nowadays.
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You should be able to choose when you like to enable chat translation and which chat channels you want it to apply to. Like in yes or no in LFG or LFR or yes/no in cities etc… Yes/no for the guild chat or general chat, etc…
Example of how it works:
