War requires resourcefulness. The same goes for games. SAP, Germany’s leading information technology (IT) company, is playing the role of “Jegal Liquide” of the global e-sports team “Team Liquid.” It uses the artificial intelligence (AI) technology of the headquarters to help manage players and organize strategies.
SAP announced an AI-based voice intelligence app in collaboration with Team Liquid on the 23rd of last month. The app converts unstructured voice data in the game into structured game insights and provides them in alignment. In other words, it analyzes the voices of players shouting during the game in an excited state and organizes them into precise data.
The coach team will be able to systematically analyze the manual review process, which took several hours, in minutes. Games such as League of Legends (LOL) continue to communicate with team members, but they were not properly analyzed because they were too large and were not high-quality data.
This app solves this problem by automating end-to-end processing of e-sports voice data. When a game or training recording is secured, the app automatically collects audio and analyzes the voice of each player. An SAP official added, “We convert the conversation content into text, identify the speaker, and analyze emotions to generate data that the team can use.”
Team Liquid also expressed satisfaction that it was able to get immediate feedback with the app. “While existing feedback was not based on data, SAP’s analysis data is more reliable because it is visualized with sophisticated data,” said Park Ro-han, a team liquid player.
Coaches can obtain objective communication data for all matches without manual input. It is possible to understand who is leading the communication, where disagreements occur, and how the emotional state changes at a critical moment. “This is the first time we have been able to systematically analyze team communication under the pressure of the actual game environment,” said Jesse Hart, senior director of sports science and analytics at Team Liquid. “The new AI-based voice intelligence app supports the analysis of unrefined voice chat data in connection with the decision-making process,” he stressed.
The new AI application runs on the SAP Business Technology platform. SAP Hana Cloud stores structured data as the core foundation of the architecture and supports emotion analysis in the database. SAP manages speaker identification information, text conversion, emotion analysis results, and metadata within a single unified management system to minimize data movement and reduce latency while ensuring traceability.
“To date, AI-based voice intelligence apps have processed thousands of audio tracks for Team Liquid,” SAP Chief Process and Information Officer (CPIO) Benjamin Blau said. “We have provided insights that can be searched in minutes and reflect emotional scores.”
Finding players and building teams are also areas where SAP’s role is drawing attention. Existing prospect discovery often relied on contacting rankers with high solo rankings or receiving recommendations from players and officials, but there was a limitation in that the influence of the human network became excessively large and it was difficult to objectively judge the player’s potential. SAP added that it has built a system that understands the strengths and growth potential of players in a more three-dimensional way based on various factors such as champion proficiency, combat judgment, operational understanding, and selection patterns in specific situations, not just ranking.
SAP aims to provide proper solutions in a variety of areas that are spread out on a team-by-team basis. At Thomas, senior director of SAP Global Sponsorship said, “We will be able to use SAP data to train players and continue the experience of a good game.”
[Reporter Kang Youngwoon]