PSA: Valorant is listening to your voice chats

Riot Games already listens to your Valorant in-game voice communication if you get reported. Now, they’re rolling out an AI moderation tool to do the job.

In a brief update shared before the weekend, Riot Games outlined what’s going to happen. On July 13, the voice evaluation system is going live in North America, but only for English communications.

This update is only going live for Valorant, not other Riot games. The system will then start using reported voice comms to train its language model.

Riot wants to launch the voice evaluation system as a beta later this year. The publisher says that it won’t be using the voice evaluation from the July test for follow-through on reports.

They want to make sure the system works, before rolling it out more widely.

“Voice evaluation during this period will not be used for disruptive behavior reports. That will only begin with the future beta. And we know that before we can even think of expanding this tool, we’ll have to be confident it’s effective, and if mistakes happen, we have systems in place to make sure we can correct any false positives (or negatives for that matter),” from Riot’s blog post.

This is all possible because Riot updated its Privacy Notice and Terms of Service last year. That update allowed for recording of voice communications. Recording is also only allowed after a report is made.

Toxicity is a big issue for online gaming. Most games don’t even give you an option to report toxic players until you’ve either died, or the match is over. That’s too late. By the point, your gaming session is already ruined.

This isn’t the only multiplayer game recording voice chat. Back 4 Blood also records all voice chats. Again, the publisher is using it for moderation tasks.

We’re not saying that these AI-powered tools are the only way to fix toxicity in gaming. That seems more of a societal thing and expecting publishers to fix it is a tall challenge.

We’re just glad that Valorant, and others, are deciding to fix the issues with voice chat moderation.

Have any thoughts on this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere. His hobbies include photography, animation, and hoarding Reddit gold.