Valorant's "in-game voice communication" monitoring begins next month

gamesradar.com:

We already knew that Riot Games had plans to record Valorant voice chat in a bid to combat toxicity, (opens in new tab) and now that time has arrived.

A year after Riot Games first made us aware of its intentions, the company posted a new blog post (opens in new tab) outlining the parameters of the voice evaluation system about to go live in North America.

Earlier this year, in an update to the studio's privacy policy, Riot confirmed it would review voice chat recordings "when disruptive voice behavior is reported" but promised it wouldn't actively eavesdrop on players' conversations. For those wanting to avoid the risk, however, they have to turn off voice chat completely.

"​​​​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," Riot said in this most recent update. 

"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."

Consequently, from July 13, Riot will "begin a background launch of the voice evaluation system in North America/English-only to help train [its] language models and get the tech in a good enough place for a beta launch later this year".

This means that, for now, voice evaluation "will not be used for disruptive behavior reports" but just testing the voice evaluation system itself