Acer’s Planet 9 was launched a year ago as the company’s comitment to the growing eSports scene. The platform allows aspiring professional gamers to hone their skills and collaborate. The vision for this next gen platform is to provide a “training arena” where pros, semipros and enthusiasts can improve their game.

“Planet 9 is a community-oriented platform designed to give gamers everywhere a chance to interact and learn from each other. It is intended to be a social platform that caters to multiple audiences: those looking to improve are introduced to similarly skilled teammates and opponents, likewise, those just looking to chat and enjoy themselves can meet other casual players…”

Andrew Chuang, AVP, Esports Services, IT Products Business, Acer Inc.

Planet9 was designed to bring different eSports communities together in one place, and a major part of the platform is effectively managing and integrating these communities. The platform helps users to find teammates based on a variety of factors such as game type, skill level and time zone. It also gathers and records a wide variety of data such as score, pathing, kill-death ratio and death location. This provides coaches and managers information they can use to help guide their players.

This year, Acer is bringing cutting edge AI to Planet9, its next-generation eSports platform, in the form of the SigridWave In-Game Live AI Translator. SigridWave has been specially designed to handle gaming terminology and jargon. It leverages deep learning technologies to bridge language barriers allowing gamers to communicate no matter where they are from. This is an important step in enhancing the gaming experience.

When SigridWave is deplyed, it will utilise Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology to recognize speech from gamers. It then converts this into strings of text, similar to how smartphones do when you use virtual assistants. This string of text is then recognised using Neural Machine Translation (NMT) technology. The NMT deployed by SigridWave has so far been trained to recognise over 10 million bilingual sentence pairs. This allows it to recognise game specific language and jargon such as “ADS” or “camping”, giving it context awareness. In-game overlays will be supported for League of Legends on launch in late 2020 or early 2021, and support will be made available for additional titles in the future.

The new technology has the potential to take competitive and professional gaming to a whole new level. Together with SigridWave, Acer also unveiled Clubs and Tournaments; two new features that will help players collaborate and compete regularly to up their game. These join a slew of new features designed to enhance competitive play and facilitate communication between brands and players.