Valorant will start listening to your voice chat in July

Riot Games will begin background evaluation of recorded in-game voice communications on July 13th in North America, in English. In a brief statement Riot said that the purpose of the recording is ultimately to "collect clear evidence that could verify any violations of behavioral policies."

For now, however, recordings will be used to develop the evaluation system that may eventually be implemented. That means training some kind of language model using the recordings, says Riot, to "get the tech in a good enough place for a beta launch later this year."

Riot also makes clear that voice evaluation from this test will not be used for reports. "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)," said Riot.