Toxicity is an unfortunate part of online gaming despite the efforts from developers. Now Riot Games is launching a new tool for Valorant that will reportedly help the developer address reports of toxic behaviour.

This tool is a voice evaluation system and its launching in 13th July, sort of. As Riot points out in a news post, this launch is meant to “help train our language models and get the tech in a good enough place for a beta launch later this year.”

During this training phase the system will only be used for evaluating disruptive behaviour 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),” Riot Games explained.

The voice monitoring tool will only be trained in North America in English when it launches and we suspect it will be a long while before it hits a wider release for Valorant players.

“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,” Riot adds.

As for privacy concerns, according to The Verge, the developer says that it won’t actively monitor live in-game voice communication and that it will only potentially listen to and review voice logs if a player is reported.

We are curious to see how this tech works in the wild if it does at all. Automated systems are often fraught with pitfalls and failures so hopefully Riot takes its time with this one before going for a public release.