One of the weirder announcements from the Next@Acer 2020 Livestream, we got a look at a new translation AI called SigridWave. Acer also announced Planet9, their new community platform for eSports.
The program is an in-game live translation service, targeted at breaking language barriers. It’s key feature is the built-in jargon, however. Rather than simply translating words 1:1, it aims to translate context-sensitive phrases to their language equivalents.
One of the examples given was the use of the word “camper”, which may not be its exact translation in other languages when referring to people who hide out in video games.
It does this by using an AI that’s been trained in 10 million bilingual sentence pairs, as well as having Automatic Speech Recognition and Neural Machine Translation.
According to Acer, the AI has been trained with over 1000 hours of game-centric speech and transcripts, allowing it to translate messages with extreme accuracy.
Sigridwave will have a closed beta some time in “Q4 of 2020”, though Acer hasn’t given any further details regarding the service.
It Came From Planet9
This is all to facilitate Planet9, Acer’s online eSports community. According to Acer, Planet9 will allow gamers to connect with each other, improve their skills as well as organize games with each other.
It does this primarily through the Teams feature, which will allow players to organize themselves into teams. They will get access to features such as a shared calendar, as well as tabs to keep track of team funding.
Additionally, Planet9 will have a Clubs feature. Clubs are targeted at more community-centric players, who want to be able to follow groups based on topics they enjoy. Unlike many social media groups Clubs will have a public facing side, as well as a private “lounge” for members exclusively.
Finally, Planet9 will have tools to allow players to set up their own tournaments. This includes tools to make forming brackets as easy as possible, so even those of us with an aversion to tedium can start our own tournaments.