Roblox Acquires Speechly
Roblox, a gaming company specializing in virtual worlds, user-generated content, and 3D immersive technology, has acquired Speechly, a Finnish voice moderation, transcription, and a Voice API provider. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
With the acquisition, Roblox will enhance its voice chat capabilities and moderation tools for real-time communication to combat toxic behavior within online communities.
Roblox has been gradually incorporating voice chat into its platform and allowing developers to integrate voice features into their games and experiences. The company also introduced avatar-based voice calls with facial motion tracking to enable users to interact virtually.
In a blog post, Roblox maintained that by incorporating new voice features, such as voice chat, it is addressing the challenge of moderating spoken language in real time. The addition of Speechly's AI expertise will help evolve traditional methods of moderation to meet the scale, real-time, and dynamic needs of a user-generated content (UGC) platform like Roblox, it said further.