Valorant’s monitoring of in-game voice chat to start in July

Being toxic in Valorant‘s voice chat could get you banned

Online games can be a ton of fun, especially when you’re getting along with your team and playing well together. What makes multiplayer experiences unbearable, though, are the players who are hellbent on making everyone else’s lives miserable. The studios behind multiplayer games, like Riot, have been doing everything they can to make sure a few toxic players don’t ruin it for everyone else, and now they’re taking even further steps to make sure everyone can play in peace.

Riot published a blog post on Valorant‘s website back in February addressing players’ concerns about toxic players, and that post referenced greater monitoring on voice chat, which is much more difficult to oversee than text. They’re finally moving forward with that particular concern, because on July 13, Riot will be starting tests of its new voice evaluation system in North America. We’ve actually had a heads up about the system for a while now, with Riot announcing a tighter focus on voice chat back in April of 2021.

Don’t worry, no one’s handing out bans just yet — the main focus of the tests is to train the software and get it to a better place for when the beta rolls around later this year.

On July 13 we’ll 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. Read more: https://t.co/MYmBfGq8QO pic.twitter.com/RBQRMBwbeN

— VALORANT (@PlayVALORANT) June 24, 2022

Of course, they’re starting out with testing this in Valorant, but the plan is to roll this feature out to all of Riot’s games at a later date, assuming it’s successful.

There might be concerns about privacy when the voice evaluation system rolls in, but I get the feeling that these studios have been able to listen in on us this whole time, assuming we were using in-game voice chat. I’m in the camp that if it’s helping make the game a more enjoyable experience for everyone, I don’t really mind the idea of this.

Not to sound too nihilistic, but all of our technology is already listening to us anyway, and at least in this case it will do something that directly helps me as a user.