Valorant will  be Monitoring your Voice Chats

On July 13th, Valorant free first-person shooter (FPS) creator Riot Games will begin listening in on player voice interactions (via PCGamer). The game developer claims that this is to aid in the training of the language models that it will ultimately employ for assessing player feedback across all of its games.

After updating its privacy policy, Riot first made this change public in April 2021. In order to eliminate hate speech and abuse using voice chat, the new conditions allow Riot to “collect and potentially assess audio data when utilizing Riot-owned voice communication channels.” When a player complains about another player for making inappropriate or abusive statements, Riot claims it will review the tape. This should make it easier for the business to assess whether the reported player broke any rules and take appropriate action.

Riot is utilizing the data it gathers to help create the beta of the system it hopes to roll out later this year, rather than beginning to evaluate player reports based on these recordings just yet. English-speaking Valorant players in North America will have their discussions analyzed by Riot. Use of another communication medium, such as Discord, or total voice chat disablement are the only ways to reject this arrangement.

Riot stated that they are aware that before we can even consider extending this tool, we must be certain that it is successful and that, in the event that mistakes are made, we have the necessary mechanisms in place to ensure that we can remedy any false positives.