Roblox is updating its chat features to give players more options to quickly and seamlessly communicate in-game.
Roblox announced a suite of updates to its in-game chat during the keynote presentation at Roblox Developers Conference in San Jose, California, today, Sept. 11. Roblox senior director of engineering Raj Sripati noted that users have sent an average of over 30 million global chat messages every day in the platform’s recently launched global chat feature, which allows users to chat with friends in conversations that move across different experiences on the platform. Across all experiences, Roblox users send approximately 1.4 billion messages each day, per Sripati. Roblox covered GamesBeat’s travel and lodging costs to attend Roblox Developers Conference 2026.
“We have actually loved seeing how lively global chat gets when you bring your community together for an event,” Sripati said during the keynote presentation.
Sripati also highlighted Roblox’s multimodal chat features, with an updated voice-to-text tool, the addition of emojis to in-game chats in the near future, as well as a “quick words” feature that allows players to communicate using a pre-selected set of words and phrases. He brought Roblox senior vice president of engineering Sebastian Barrios to the keynote stage to demonstrate this new feature in a game of Dragon Adventures.
“We know that players love to talk while they play, so next year, we’re going to make this co-play experience better by launching voice calling on Roblox — and this time we’ll get it right,” Barrios said during the keynote presentation. Spatial voice chat has been available on Roblox for years, but the ability to call friends directly to initiate a voice chat is an expansion of the platform’s voice chat features.
Unlike other child-safe preset chat features on Roblox and other platforms, Roblox’s new quick words tool allows developers to submit their own list of preset phrases for their experiences, which will be approved by Roblox moderators. Messages sent using the quick words tool will be marked with a dedicated symbol in Roblox’s in-game chats.
“They will be reviewed to make sure they’re age appropriate, but they’ll pop up right next to the words we have already — so players will be able to interact with what’s specific and relevant to your game,” Sripati said.
The updates to Roblox’s chat functions and voice calling features announced during today’s Roblox Developers Conference keynote represent Roblox’s ongoing push to become both a game marketplace and a full-fledged social media platform. Many of the Roblox developers in attendance for the keynote cheered when they heard about the chat updates, with the addition of emojis to Roblox’s in-game chat eliciting a particularly raucous celebration. These updates were among a slew of broader updates and announcements shared during today’s RDC keynote talk, including the ability to publish Roblox games as standalone apps, increased support for 2D and 2.5D game creation, and the ability to play some games while offline.
“Chat is central to how the Roblox community comes together, and we have made significant progress,” Sripati said. “Now, we are focused on making chat livelier than ever before.”