Riot Games announces plans to begin monitoring English-language voice chat in VALORANT in North America next month. This will help test a program that will support reports of disruptive behavior. This will kick off on July 13th, but this will only be for testing, but it will not be used for discipline until the system is tested and tweaked further. Word is: "This is brand new tech and there will for sure be growing pains. But the promise of a safer and more inclusive environment for everyone who chooses to play is worth it." Voice chat can be a hotbed of toxicity, so it will be interesting to see if this approach can have a positive impact. Here's the plan:

As part of a larger effort to combat disruptive behavior, Riot Games recently updated its Privacy Notice and Terms of Service to allow us to record and evaluate in-game voice communications when a report for that type of behavior is submitted—with the goal of kicking this off in VALORANT first.

Earlier this year, we also mentioned that as a part of our current game systems that combat disruptive behavior, voice evaluation would provide a way to collect clear evidence that could verify any violations of behavioral policies before we can take any action. This would also help us share back to players why a particular action resulted in a penalty.

On July 13 we will begin a background launch of the voice evaluation system in North America/English-only to help train our language models and get the tech in a good enough place for a beta launch later this year.

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).

This is brand new tech and there will for sure be growing pains. But the promise of a safer and more inclusive environment for everyone who chooses to play is worth it.